Sitting in a brick-walled conference room on Election Day at Google’s office in Washington, DC, Phil Venables, Chief Information Security Officer of Google Cloud, runs through his recent to-do list: Earlier that day, he met with product teams getting ready to launch new security features meant to protect enterprise clients. Then he’d worked on a “significant upgrade” to Google’s broader technical infrastructure, beyond his normal purview of the cloud. Now he was prepping for a talk on managing the risks of AI adoption in financial services to be delivered the next day at the International Monetary Fund.
But top of mind throughout was another crucial task: meeting with customers piloting Google’s cloud service, who are trying the tech giant’s AI tools for the first time. Venables leads the division’s customer advisory board, where he works with the CISOs and CIOs of other companies to safeguard their operations while using Google’s services.
This year, Venables is an honoree on the 2024 Forbes CIO Next list, which spotlights the best and brightest C-level executives in the field of technology and security information. He’s also a bit more than that. As Google Cloud’s CISO, Venables has become a sort of AI and cybersecurity whisperer for colleagues in similar roles at other enterprises that rely on Google’s services. He’s the CISO’s CISO.
“I like to think of my role as not just CISO for Google Cloud,” Venables told Forbes. “But like a trusted advisor to 1,000s of other companies.”
His potential customer pool is massive, and growing. Almost two-thirds of organizations say they’re now using AI in at least one business function, up from a third last year, according to a May report from consulting giant McKinsey. And 67% expect their companies to invest even more in AI over the next three years. But with more........