Cybersecurity Today RSAC Recap: Agentic AI and Interview With Commvault CISO Bill O'Connell
Mar 28, 2026
Bill O'Connell, Commvault Chief Security Officer with decades in security, talks backup, resilience, and ResOps. He and the hosts discuss agentic AI takeover, AI-driven funding and hiring shifts, and how AI empowers attackers. They also cover translating risk for leaders and why recovery planning and practicing restores matter more than prevention alone.
AI Snips
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Transcript
Episode notes
AI Is Reshaping Security Funding
- Cybersecurity funding and valuations are shifting as investor attention moves to AI, threatening the previous decade’s easy funding climate.
- David Shipley warned this could close the funding tap and force consolidation among ~4,000 vendors.
Agentic SOC Will Increase Security Costs
- Agentic SOC and frontier models will be compute‑intensive, and those costs will be passed to customers.
- Shipley predicted higher prices as providers face heavy bills from underlying model usage.
AI Gives Attackers A Large Advantage
- Generative and agentic AI disproportionately favor attackers because they can adopt at speed with no penalty for failure.
- Shipley estimated the advantage skews roughly 80/20 toward attackers and cited phishing‑as‑a‑service demos.