Four big enterprise lessons from Walmart’s AI security: agentic risks, identity reboot, velocity with governance, and AI vs. AI defense
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Summary
Jerry R. Geisler III, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Walmart, spoke to VentureBeat about how the company is approaching security as AI becomes increasingly autonomous within the company’s operations.
With agentic AI, the company is focusing on building robust, proactive security controls, advanced AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM) to ensure continuous risk monitoring, data protection, regulatory compliance and operational trust.
In terms of identity management and zero trust architectures, the focus is on modernising and simplifying the approach, whilst embedding the principles of “least privilege” and ongoing evaluation of identity, data sensitivity and risk.
In a large, hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure such as Walmart’s, Geisler highlighted that segmentation is based on identity rather than network location, with access policies following workloads consistently.
With regard to security talent attraction and retention, the company offers schemes such as Live Better U (LBU) to help associates pursue degrees and certifications in cybersecurity, and annual SparkCon conference for renowned professionals to share strategies and explore latest threats and techniques.