Talks
Media & Speaking
I brief boards and executive teams on the architectural and operational disciplines that determine how institutions perform under stress, drawing on 25 years of practice across military intelligence, global financial services, and enterprise cybersecurity.
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 has spent twenty-five years in security across military intelligence, global financial services, and enterprise cybersecurity. He was the board-appointed CISO of two Northwestern Mutual subsidiaries: a federally chartered savings association, and a registered broker-dealer. He writes Becoming Cyber and CyberFuture on what autonomous defense does to security work and who does it, and holds an advisory seat at 7AI, a company in the category that writing examines.
Oritse J. Uku has spent twenty-five years in security across military intelligence, global financial services, and enterprise cybersecurity. He was the board-appointed CISO of two Northwestern Mutual subsidiaries: a federally chartered savings association, and a registered broker-dealer. He served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. He authored the Resilience Operating Discipline (ROD), a framework for building institutions that perform under stress, govern risk at scale, and demonstrate regulatory readiness. He holds an advisory seat at 7AI, an agentic security company backed by Index Ventures and Greylock, and he writes about that category regularly. He writes Becoming Cyber, on what it means to become and remain a cybersecurity professional as AI absorbs the entry tier of the career, and CyberFuture, on governance and board oversight of security.
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.