Episode 18: Camille Stewart Gloster on Treating AI Agents Like New Hires

She helped shape the nation’s tech security strategy from the White House. Now she helps companies clean up after sprinkling AI on everything like glitter. Camille Stewart Gloster has spent her career where emerging technology meets security. She served as the first deputy national cyber director for technology and ecosystem security at the White House, led global product security strategy at Google, and now runs CAS Strategies, a cybersecurity and emerging tech advisory firm. She is also the author of The Insider You Built. AI is nothing new in cybersecurity, where it has powered anomaly detection for years. Camille’s wake-up call came when ChatGPT launched and her mom called to ask what it was. After leaving government to help companies adopt AI, she found many of them “just kinda sprinkling some AI on things.” Like glitter, it looks fun until you’re the one who has to clean it up. Her biggest pet peeve is how organizations hand agents the keys to the kingdom. Agents are not people, she cautions, yet they act inside your organization with real access and authority, making decisions on your behalf. We traded intern analogies (plus a hypothetical agent that answers a request for a cheeseburger story by ordering actual cheeseburgers on DoorDash) and landed in the same place: agents need specific instructions, clear boundaries on what they should not do, and human checks. Camille hopes we land somewhere between Terminator and tech utopia, closer to the utopia, where AI helps solve challenges like climate change and health outcomes and gives us time back to be human. Getting there depends on people making intentional, risk-based decisions about AI, the same way they do about everything else in their lives. 0:49 From the White House and Google to CAS Strategies 2:40 Sprinkling AI like glitter, and who cleans it up 3:51 Building an AI chief of staff without email access 5:14 Why agents are like hiring a new employee 7:26 Smart enough to be dangerous 8:49 Camille’s hope for AI: intentional, risk-based decisions Learn more about CAS Strategies at https://www.cas-strategies.com/about Get the Insider You Built: https://www.amazon.com/clp/1394430892