AI is accelerating everything — including your attack surface.

Prompt injection. Shadow AI. Non-human identities. Automated agents making decisions at machine speed. The pressure to move fast is real. So is the risk.

In this episode, Fortinet’s Aamir Lakhani and WWT’s Dave Pisarek lay out a practical path forward. No hype — just the controls that actually work.

We cover:

• Why prompt injection isn’t going away
• How attackers hide payloads in unexpected encodings
• Why identity and access management is becoming the control plane for AI
• Guardrails that matter: least privilege, segmentation, scoped agents, robust logging
• Why every automated system needs a human-reviewed “undo”

You’ll also hear where AI is already helping SOC teams move faster — surfacing anomalies, correlating IOCs, and shrinking time to containment.

If you’re being asked to scale AI while preventing breaches, this is the conversation to have with your security and engineering leaders.

Speed is inevitable.

Exposure isn’t.

More about this week's guests:

Dave Pisarek is a Fortinet Practice Manager with 24 years of experience in information technology and a Fortinet NSE 4 certification. He specializes in network security design and integration, translating complex technical requirements into practical, standards-based solutions. Known for his clear communication and problem-solving skills, Dave develops business plans, architectural designs, and project documentation that align security strategy with operational outcomes.

Dave's top pick: Fortinet Xperts 2025

Aamir Lakhani is Global Director of Threat Intelligence and Adversarial AI Research at Fortinet. With more than 15 years in cybersecurity, he leads research and architectural strategy across cyber defense, malware, mobile threats, and advanced persistent threats. Aamir has designed solutions for major commercial, federal, and defense intelligence organizations, helping them defend against sophisticated adversaries while advancing FortiGuard and AI-driven security capabilities.

Aamir's top pick: Stop Stacking Boxes. Start Designing Security.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

Most AI teams aren’t losing to the model.

They’re losing to bad prompts.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT’s Liz Gattra breaks down the invisible tax of vague instructions, blind trust in outputs and endless iteration loops that quietly burn tokens, waste GPU cycles and drag down ROI.

As generative AI moves into production, AI literacy becomes operational leverage — not a soft skill.

We cover:
• A practical prompt blueprint that improves output quality fast
• Why “confident but wrong” is more expensive than you think
• How precision reduces token spend and compute waste
• When to switch between ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude
• Why system prompts, agents and context engineering determine whether AI scales or spirals

Every vague prompt compounds.

The teams that win don’t just deploy models — they train people to think clearly, structure intent and treat prompts like lightweight programs with measurable results.

If you care about AI ROI, compute efficiency, and scaling generative AI in the enterprise, start here.

Precision isn’t optional. It’s a cost control strategy.

Support for this episode provided by: ExtraHop

More about this week's guest:

Liz Gattra is Director of Product Ownership at World Wide Technology’s Application Services practice. A former Agile Coach, IT manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Business Analyst, she has led enterprise agile transformations and built product ownership capabilities across internal and client teams. Liz develops and trains product owners to deliver measurable business value at scale. She holds a Master’s in Biology and Biomedical Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis and brings nearly 20 years of cross-industry IT experience.

Liz's top pick: The AI Adoption Gap Isn't Technical. It's Human.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

AI pilots are easy.
Scaling AI across a live network is not.

As organizations move beyond experimentation, the challenge isn’t better models — it’s building AI that operates like infrastructure: reliable, secure, and measurable.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Matt Shorts, AVP of AI at Cox Communications, joins WWT’s Greg Schoeny to share how Cox moved AI from isolated pilots into production across a customer-facing network where uptime, trust, and scale matter daily.

You’ll learn:

• Why operating conditions expose bad AI decisions fast
• How to modernize without waiting for perfect data
• The risks of rushing into closed platforms
• Why momentum beats perfection
• How framing AI as augmentation — not replacement — drives adoption

This episode is for CIOs, infrastructure leaders, and platform teams responsible for deploying AI in complex, regulated environments.

The bottom line: AI only delivers value when it behaves like infrastructure.

And infrastructure rewards discipline — not hype.

More about this week's guests:

Greg Schoeny is Senior Vice President of Services and Strategic Solutions at WWT, leading services sales, business development, and architecture for the Global Service Provider (GSP) business. His team delivers outcome-driven solutions across AI, cloud, security, mobility, automation, and advisory services, supporting customers with professional services, managed services, staffing, and strategic consulting.

Matt Cox is a technology leader with 20+ years of experience driving digital transformation and product innovation. He specializes in AI strategy, multi-cloud optimization, and building high-performing teams. Matt has led successful product launches, developed IP strategies, and architected IoT solutions that unlock new revenue and operational efficiency, aligning technology with measurable business impact.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.