Michael Argast

Talk Title: Building a world class security harness - leveraging AI to accelerate your organization's security posture

Talk Abstract:

Every security team is drowning. Too many alerts, too many frameworks, too many clients, not enough people. The usual answer is "hire more analysts," but the practical reality is you can't hire your way out of it.

This talk is about a different answer: building a security harness. Not buying another tool, but building the scaffolding — guardrails, agents, and repeatable workflows — that lets a small team move like a much bigger one.

I'll walk through how we did it at Kobalt.io, where we run security and compliance programs for hundreds of organizations with a team a fraction of the size you'd expect. Real examples: the security rails we wrap around our own AI agents so they can touch client data safely, the agentic "gates" we use to keep a human in the loop without taking the AI off the leash, and the harness that actually builds other harnesses for us.

You'll leave with a practical model for where AI genuinely accelerates security work, where it absolutely should not, and the first three things to put in place before you point an agent at anything that matters. People, process, and technology. None of them solves this alone, and AI doesn't change that. It just makes the gaps show up faster.

This is a builder's talk, not a vendor pitch. Bring your skepticism.