From Citigroup to retail: thinking like a CFO

Guest:

• Arvin Bansal, CISO, C&S Wholesale Grocers

Topics:

• Most people do not associate grocery wholesale and retail with cutting edge technology and threat models. Can you produce the receipts for why this isn't a story of dry goods but rather a very meaty topic with beefy adversaries?
• How are you as the CISO enabling C&S's journey into AI and LLM driven work? Securing AI is a bit harder than securing classic analytics tools, right?
• In addition to securely rolling out AI, how is your defense team using AI to secure C&S? Are you into the era of agentic triage and response? What metrics for AI is your D&R lead surfacing up to you?
• You have AI in the business process that - if failed - will leave people hungry. How do you approach AI resilience?
• How do you approach resilience in general? Is cloud part of your resilience strategy?
• You worked at Citigroup for a long time. What's it like having grocery margin budgets for security instead? How does your thinking change? Does this shift your build/buy/outsource for security?
• If your IoT stack falls over, you've got literal ice cream melting in a warehouse. How do you balance your investments in cyber risk with physical operational risk? Should I be scared of forklifts?

Resources:

• EP275 Google Cloud Next 2026: The AI Earthquake, "SOC-home" Syndrome, and the Ragged Edge of Reality
• EP247 The Evolving CISO: From Security Cop to Cloud & AI Champion
• EP208 The Modern CISO: Balancing Risk, Innovation, and Business Strategy (And Where is Cloud?)
• EP212 Securing the Cloud at Scale: Modern Bank CISO on Metrics, Challenges, and SecOps