Talks
Media & Speaking
I speak on incident command, security operations, and what agentic AI is doing to the entry tier of the profession. The experience behind it runs from incident command on major cybersecurity incidents at Citigroup, through two board-appointed CISO seats at Northwestern Mutual, back to service as a U.S. Army intelligence officer.
Background and career →Speaking themes
Five subjects I can take to a board.
Resilience as something measured
Moving past compliance theater to a stated tolerance, a rehearsed recovery, and a record a board can read.
Identity as the control plane
Why identity became the boundary that modern enterprise architecture actually enforces, and what follows for continuity.
What boards and regulators now expect
The shift from documented plans to demonstrated capability, and what a CISO is asked to produce under it.
The Resilience Operating Discipline
A unified operating process across cyber, risk, and continuity. The discipline →
What it automates, and how boards should govern it
What autonomous agents are permitted to touch, who answers when they act, and what their arrival does to the entry tier of the profession. The Pipeline Paradox →
Delivered
Where these have been given.
Breakout panel, “A Cloud Chat For All Phases.” Pier Sixty, New York.
CXO panel on the cybersecurity talent gap.
Current subject
Agentic AI is automating the entry tier of cybersecurity. That work was repetitive and burned people out, so automating it is defensible.
The complication is that the same entry tier was where the field made its experts: the toil and the apprenticeship were the same activity. The open question is how anyone becomes senior now.
Availability
Conversations, not engagements.
Media interviews and commentary. Panel discussions. Conference sessions. Industry conversations related to my published work.
Consulting engagements of any kind. I am not a consultant and do not accept them.
Any current or former employer’s environment, any transaction involving a company I advise, or any vendor comparison.
I advise 7AI, an agentic security company backed by Index Ventures and Greylock, and I write about the category regularly. Nothing non-public appears in what I publish, whether from that seat or from any operating role. Full disclosures →
For journalists
Cleared for use, without checking first.
Everything in this section can be published as written. If you need something that is not here, email me. I answer.
Download the headshot → JPEG, 974 × 974.
Cleared for editorial use with the credit Courtesy of Oritse J. Uku. No separate permission needed, and no need to ask first.
Oritse J. Uku is a cybersecurity executive. He was board-appointed CISO of two Northwestern Mutual subsidiaries, and at Citigroup he served as incident commander on major cybersecurity incidents and built the bank’s first cloud incident-response program. He began as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. He writes Becoming Cyber and CyberFuture and advises 7AI, a company in the category that writing examines.
Oritse J. Uku is a cybersecurity executive. From 2022 he ran security for two Northwestern Mutual subsidiaries, a federally chartered savings association and a registered broker-dealer, and in 2025 their boards appointed him CISO of both. At Citigroup he led the cyber threat management team for North America, served as incident commander on major cybersecurity incidents, and built the bank’s first cloud incident-response program, training more than three dozen responders. He began as a U.S. Army intelligence officer and deployed to Afghanistan as senior intelligence officer for the Army command advising Afghan forces across the western region. He writes Becoming Cyber, on becoming and remaining a cybersecurity professional as agentic AI absorbs the entry tier, and CyberFuture, on what security developments mean for the people who run the response. He advises 7AI, an agentic security company, and writes about that category regularly.
Quotations cleared for use
Three lines, with their sources.
Each is published work, cited so you can see where it came from without asking.
“The first cybersecurity job—the bottom of the alert queue, where nearly everyone I respect in this field started—is being automated. Not gone. Being automated, right now, while people are still sitting in it.”
Becoming Cyber, “Becoming Cyber returns on 20 August”, 15 August 2026
“Hand the toil to software and the apprenticeship goes with it.”
Becoming Cyber, “Becoming Cyber returns on 20 August”, 15 August 2026. In the original this sentence closes a passage that first grants the automation is largely warranted, and the surrounding paragraph is worth reading before quoting it alone.
“It was the school, the apprenticeship—though nobody ever called it that.”
Becoming Cyber, “Nobody Called It an Apprenticeship”, 20 August 2026
The first two quotations concern the automation of entry-level security work, and I hold an advisory seat at an agentic security company. That disclosure appears in the original posts and is repeated here so it travels with the quote.
Inquiries
Speaking, interviews, and questions about published work.
All views expressed are my own and do not represent the views of any employer, past or present.