ClearTech Loop: In the Know, On the Move

Security Is an Environment with Miri Rodriguez

• ClearTech Research / Jo Peterson • Season 1 • Episode 39

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0:00 | 15:48

What CISOs miss when security only lives in features 

AI security is still getting framed like a technology problem: new tools, new controls, new dashboards, and new rules. In this episode of ClearTech Loop, Jo Peterson talks with Miri Rodriguez, Cofounder and CEO of Empressa.ai, about why that framing keeps breaking in the real world. 

Miri brings a people first lens to AI adoption and security. She argues that security is not just something you install. It is an environment people are willing to enter. When the environment does not feel secure, adoption either slows or goes underground, and then security teams are left trying to govern what they cannot see. 

This conversation connects three practical leadership threads: using GenAI upstream to understand real adoption patterns, embedding security and privacy without slowing innovation by designing for humans, and building governance that becomes habit instead of paperwork. 

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Key Quotes
“The opportunity is massive when you think about security as an environment, not just a technology or a feature.” 
“The features don’t matter. If you can’t tell me why the features are important in my space.” 

Three Big Ideas from This Episode 

  1. GenAI beyond the tool stack
    Generative AI can help security leaders widen the lens on adoption. Before policies and controls, leaders need to understand where people hesitate, where they take shortcuts, and why the secure path gets avoided. 
  2. Inclusion is a security control
    Speed without inclusion creates blind spots, and blind spots become risk. Security and privacy do not have to slow innovation, but they do have to be designed in a way people can understand and follow. 
  3. Governance is behavior
    If governance does not translate into day to day habits, it is just documentation. Training format matters as much as content, and security sticks when people see it as personal responsibility, not corporate paperwork. 

Additional Resources 

About the Guest
Miri Rodriguez is Cofounder and CEO at Empressa.ai, an AI and storytelling strategist, bestselling author, and Microsoft alum. She focuses on ethical innovation, inclusion, and building trustworthy AI environments where women can connect, learn, and thrive. She is also the author of Brand Storytelling: Put Customers at the Heart of Your Brand Story. 

 

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Jo Peterson:

Hey everyone, thanks so much for joining clear tech loop. I'm Jo Peterson. I'm the vice president of cloud and security for clarify 360 and the chief analyst at cleartech research. And I'm here today with Miri Rodriguez, CEO of Empressa AI, Hi, Miri.

Miri Rodriguez:

Hi, thanks for having me. Jo. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you.

Jo Peterson:

Thank you for taking time to visit. In case you're not feeling following Miri yet, she's a book author and a lot and has a long time pedigree at Microsoft. And if you curious about impressive AI, please go check it out. It's an AI networking platform for women that provides a secure and trustworthy space for them to connect. So much needed. So yeah, much needed. Thank you for thinking of that and bringing it to life. In case your guys are new to clear tech loop. We're a hot take podcast, so we're focused on cyber security, cloud security and AI security, and each week we ask the guests three focus questions. We want to get their perspective to educate our listeners about the security landscape in real time that's both risks and opportunities. So let's get going. The first question. Miri, how can cyber security professionals leverage generative AI to sort of break out of that traditional tools and tech mindset and drive more innovative thinking and execution in their security programs?

Miri Rodriguez:

Yeah, it's a great question. Jo I as I think about the work that clear ticked us in how, how you focus on three areas of security? I'm coming from a space in an innovation that caters to women and security. It's actually what we need, and it's not just tools and technology. It's a mindset. It's a curity that we are be entering a space that is secure for us, mentally, emotionally and, of course, technologically. So when you think about generative AI right now, one of the things that I believe leaders can do in this space is really look and use this generative generative AI tools to understand with empathy, to do research about how women are approaching AI tools. How are women are approaching the cloud and security in the cloud, we are actually and I've been doing studies for about two years. We just launched the press that this year. So prior to launching, I was really delving into, how are women and why? Why are they adopting or not. How are they approaching technology in this era of AI, especially generative AI technology, and there is a lot of hesitation, there is a lot of skepticism, while they are adopting for things that, to them seem quick, automations such as, help me, you know, revise this document. They are not thinking of it as an as a tool that can really go hand in hand to their business functions. And so they are not adopting it as fast. And there's many reasons why, one of them is they don't feel secure. So as leaders, when you think about security, it's not just the built in features that allow for male factors to not come into the environment or to break through and steal data. It really is an entire system and environment that enables women to feel secure within and that really talks to the empathy and how they're learning and adopting the languages that you use around technology and how they're thinking of it, if it matters to them or not. So women know what technology, what this technology is. They know how to use it, but they don't. They don't really align to saying, Well, I actually enter this phase and use generative AI for things that really matter to me. No, they're not thinking that way, because we're not mentioning it that way. So when we think security, and we can say, hey, this is a technology that you can leverage for your business functions. This is a technology you can use to build your business or to scale your business, and it is secure this way. Then women go, oh, okay, great. Now I understand how that security enables me beyond just chatting, you know, chat, GPT, in something for you know my travel arrangements. So back to your question, how can we use generative AI? Leaders? Use generative AI to build security system, and I, in this case, for women and empathy, do the research and understand how women are using it. Do the research and understanding use use generative AI to help you those with those readers research, I recommend perplexity. I've been using it a lot for research based. It's a lot better than GPT models, because chat GPT can get stuck. There's a lot of data in research, so when you're doing a research paper, it can get stuck. Perplexity actually helps you more, and it's a lot more expansive in the sources and everything else. And. Um, but just use it as a research tool. See what the internet is saying. Understand the environment that women are coming in, and in that matter, any other minority, a minority group that you may be thinking about when you're thinking about security a lot of times. From from a technology perspective, we want to just get stuck in the features of the technology and the security features of that but we have to understand technology is doing business with humans, and so it doesn't that doesn't translate to them. The features don't matter. If you can't tell me why the features are important in my space, and for me, it's not going to matter to me. So I think that's going to help a lot of leaders to enable technologies for women that are now entering the space and that are getting curious about the space.

Jo Peterson:

That's such a good answer because, and it's really forward thinking. Because, first of all, we're all consumers, yeah, matter what our job is. And second, my mind went to some of the things that we're going to start seeing in the first quarter of 2026 which is going to be some of the tech manufacturers. And you probably know this, are going to introduce super agents, yes, and they're going to be assistance, air quotes, assistance, right? They're going to learn our behaviors, the things that we like. They're going to be built into some of the technologies, like maybe our personal laptop, yeah. And this will be our personal assistant, and that's a really great way to get somebody comfortable with instead of thinking of it as a thing, thinking of it as a helper, yeah?

Miri Rodriguez:

And so you're talking about frontier firm. Microsoft refers to that as the frontier firm. We actually just impressed. I just pulled out a report just two weeks ago or last week, actually, we had an event, a global event, and we were able to, I've been doing this, like I said, this resource research for two years. So plus the event, we have a lot of data around how women are approaching this frontier firm, this agentic workforce. And back to what you're saying, the opportunity is massive when you think about security as an environment versus a technology or a feature technology, a lot of times we're thinking, what are those entry points, and how do we block them, or how do we secure them? There's that security, and then there's the environment where we're all really intertwining tech, AI, really artificial intelligence with human intelligence. And so if that environment does not feel secure, so that there's a feature and then there's a feeling of security, if we don't properly create a feeling of security, we're going to miss out on a lot of people who are not immediately adopting for compelling reasons. And so So it's interesting, and I think it's an opportunity to also educate there.

Jo Peterson:

Yeah, that's a great answer. You know, speed's a thing, right? Everybody wants to get further ahead faster, helping organizations, in your opinion, embed security and privacy to make people feel safe into AI models without really slowing down innovation. What's your thinking there,

Miri Rodriguez:

yeah, in my in my experience and what I've seen. So I spent 13 years at Microsoft, and in different this different functions of the organization, engineering, HR, sales, operations, release, for technology. And one of the things that I learned, and that I'm bringing into empresa is this idea around security also being something that educates. We educate with security. So it's really around the opportunity that we have to educate, what that means to people if we, if we again, get stuck with just the technology, or talk about the features, we miss the opportunity to really enable, enable security to be built in, not bolt on, right? So a lot of times the design, if we don't include inclusion, really is what I'm saying. If include people at the design level, and we bring different voices and different perspectives, then we can really understand what security means to people. A lot of times we think we know, and then we create the systems and we create the technology for that, and we may be missing something specific. I'll give you an example. A lot of women right now are using just testing, generative AI for things like self diagnosing for a lot of ailments. A lot of women go through cyclical things that doctors have said it's just stress, and they're like, No, I feel there's something wrong. They'll start using chat, GPT or different generative, generative, generative, AI tools. I love that, and I love that, the idea that we're doing that however, we forget that those tools are sourcing from the internet, which 80% of the content in the internet is authored by men, and so it is very skewed, and our data obviously is not going to give us what we need. And so inclusion is going to be a primordial thing for organizations to really have a golden i. Security based system. We cannot secure a system if we're not including people who we want to secure if they don't look like them. And so what does security mean at different levels? It may mean something different for me as a woman, for someone who is of a different ethnicity. So there is a layer and intersectionality to what security is going to look like. And so my recommendation and what we're doing. You talk about speed and being fast, go slow in that, in the security piece of your features, go slow enough to consider the intersectionality of what security means. It is not one size fits all. It never has been and it never will be. There are children, there are elderly. There's a lot of breadth that needs to be understood when we think of the of the system that involves security and so learning it and including people in it as part of as part of the output, I think it's going to be a winning mix. It has been for us at empresa we we've been very successful, I dare say, carefully, but I do say that we've been very successful at bringing and bridging the pieces that we want to bring women into our fold with understanding of what security means to them.

Jo Peterson:

Yeah. So important. Some of the things you're saying, don't forget the human development, you know, in element of things, and think about the broad audience, right, not a narrow audience. And so while we're thinking about audiences, yeah, the workers at an organization are the CISOs audience and so, and this is a balanced question, right? How should the CISO be thinking about AI adoption, not only in terms of its use to secure emerging threats, strong use cases there, but from an organizational governance perspective, from his people's perspective,

Miri Rodriguez:

yeah, so we know in security that it is even the organization's people are the the audience. They're also a lot of times the very threat to the security is a lot of user error. We know that very, very well. Organization there's there opens up a whole lot of risk in the behavior. And that all comes down to, obviously, again, education, but it's, it's back to how we learn. So one of the things that I have learned, which I didn't know being a woman, about how women learn, for example, which we are, we have proved, and now test, tested and have proved, is that women do not learn on self paced content. They just don't. They'll start it. They'll even pay for it. They'll probably, you know, give it an hour or two. And there's an entire thing behind them that just, they'll never get back to it. And they, it's a very it's like seven to 10% of women will actually finish a course that is on demand. The other part of that is probably a men wrote that course. And so it's not, it doesn't. Again, the question is, what's in it? For me, they don't see what's in it for me. So that same psychology can be used to your organization and your employees and your users. What's in it for them? Is it just a check off that I have to, you know, it's part of my, my thing. I have to check it off, and it's part of my, my learning path. Or do I really understand the impact that my actions, me opening up, you know, an email that looks a little weird, or the I don't know that. You know where it comes from, I still click on that link. Do I understand the impact of that, not just to the organization, to myself? What does that do when I'm not educated inside and outside the organization? It's really about understanding behavior, and how do I take that behavior inside and outside? Because the same person who's opening that email there, it's also opening the same email at home, in their in their in their Gmail account and their personal account. So it is about understanding user behavior. And when we stop saying it's just for the company, or check it off as your learning path, it's really the impact of you as a human being in the era of AI, then it's like, oh, there's a bigger implication to me. And so I want to make sure that I'm educated. I want to understand the threats, I want to understand the risks. I want to be aware of what's happening in my environment, outside of my environment. And so the implications are important in what matters to you. So how people learn is important. And I know that we want to go fast, and I know that we need to obviously streamline. But within that, I believe, and we've done it at empresa, that there is opportunity just to pause and really create a place where people go. This matters to me, and this is why. And so when you hand it, when you hand over security as a thing that people should care for, it's a handover. It's not like here it is, going to throw it at you. Go, be secure, because you need it, right? It's more like, here it is. Explore it. Think about it. See how it impacts you, your children, your generation, your family. What is that impact? We think, I always think of security as this front door. Nobody leaves the front door open right of your house. You just don't. So why don't we think about. Up that way. This is same mentality. Somebody taught you to close the door in your house, because that's something you got to do. So how do you close the door and those potential risks of emails and links and open things that we do that user behavior? So it is about a more care, caring security, education on what matters to you and what's a good

Jo Peterson:

way to think about it. I really like the human element that you're bringing into the picture. So thank you for your thought leadership today. Thank you for taking time to visit us from beautiful Madrid and everyone. Thank you so much for joining you. You.