AI innovation is advancing faster than security integration, leaving enterprises vulnerable to threats ranging from AI bot scraping to compromised conversational agents. This discussion explores how organizations can protect both their data and business models while embracing AI-driven growth.
At Black Hat USA 2025, Rupesh Chokshi, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Akamai Technologies, connected with ITSPmagazine’s Sean Martin to discuss the dual realities shaping enterprise AI adoption—tremendous opportunity and significant risk.
AI is driving a seismic transformation in business operations, with executive teams rapidly deploying proof-of-concept projects to capture competitive advantage. Yet, as Chokshi notes, many of these initiatives race ahead without fully integrating security teams into the process. While budgets for AI are expanding, funding for AI-specific security measures often lags behind, leaving organizations exposed.
One of the most pressing concerns is the rise of AI bots—Akamai observes 150 billion such bots traversing networks daily. These bots scrape valuable digital content, train models on it, and, in some cases, replace direct customer interactions with summarized answers. The result? Lost marketing leads, disrupted sales funnels, and even manipulated product recommendations—all without traditional “breach” indicators.
This is not just a security problem; it’s a business continuity challenge. Organizations must develop strategies to block or manage scraping, including commercial agreements for content usage. Beyond this, the proliferation of conversational AI agents—whether for booking tickets, providing mortgage information, or recommending products—introduces new attack surfaces. Threat actors exploit prompt injections, jailbreaks, and code execution vulnerabilities to compromise these interfaces, risking both customer trust and brand reputation.
Akamai’s response includes capabilities such as Firewall for AI, providing in-line visibility and control over AI-driven sessions, and bot mitigation technologies that protect high-value content. By offering real-time threat intelligence tailored to customer environments, Akamai helps enterprises maintain agility without sacrificing protection.
Chokshi’s call to action is clear: every company is now an AI company, and security must be embedded from the outset. Boards should view security not as a budget line item, but as the foundation for innovation velocity, brand integrity, and long-term competitiveness.
Learn more about Akamai: https://itspm.ag/akamailbwc
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Guests:
Rupesh Chokshi, SVP & General Manager, Application Security, Akamai | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupeshchokshi/
Hosts:
Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com
Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine | Website: https://www.marcociappelli.com
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[00:00:00] Sean Martin: let's do it. Let's do it. Rupe, here we are.
[00:00:03] Sean Martin: We're in Las Vegas. Yes, we are. A few miles from San Francisco. Yep. Few miles from Francisco, a few miles from London, few miles from London as well. Always good to see you, my friend. Yeah, same here. Yeah, you have the best stories I have to say, and uh, it's always a pleasure to to chat with you. So, uh, here we are in Las Vegas, black hat USA 2025.
[00:00:24] Sean Martin: Show floor is buzzing. It is, I mean. Great presentations. A lot of people looking at, uh, demos here at the booth. Really good stuff. Um, what, I know we're, we're just getting started. You, you had a few days here, I think. Yeah. Kind of meeting, meeting people and seeing some customers. What's, what's the general vibe?
[00:00:43] Sean Martin: Are people, what positive about the, the future of. Business operations with innovative technologies with security and risk in mind? Or are they afraid of what's gonna, what's coming?
[00:00:55] Rupesh Chokshi: I, I think the general sort of, you know, why is, is positive, right? In [00:01:00] terms of, if you look at what's happening in the broader global economy.
[00:01:05] Rupesh Chokshi: You know, technology investments continue to be at the forefront, and we're seeing that come through some of the earnings reports. And underneath that, there is the whole kind of cybersecurity industry that is again, expanding. Partly because the biggest transformation evolution forward looking is the AI era, right?
[00:01:27] Rupesh Chokshi: That is the most kind of seismic thing that is happening in our industry right now. And cybersecurity is gonna play a very, very big. A role in making AI
[00:01:37] Sean Martin: successful? Yeah, so I, I have the privilege and pleasure of getting to chat with a number of CISOs, CISO dinners, and, and I, and I recognize that when you're in a, a CISO setting, certainly security is kind of the topic.
[00:01:52] Sean Martin: But I'm wondering your perspective, talking to organizations at the executive level across the board. Right, right. I, I still [00:02:00] get a sense that security is attached or riding alongside a lot of the innovations. As opposed to we're going to secure or deploy innovations that are, that happen to be secure.
[00:02:13] Sean Martin: It's a very fine line nuance there, but do you find that organizations are really thinking about risk as they're building or are they building and, and securing kind of separate?
[00:02:26] Rupesh Chokshi: I feel like there is a sort of like a, you know, tale of two cities, so. If you think about all of the work that the security leaders have done with the business leaders is, is playing a working out, right?
[00:02:39] Rupesh Chokshi: Whether it is application security, network security, endpoint security, you know, enterprises are more and more secure every day, secure by design. It's kind of like, you know, work hand in hand. Um, so that is happening. But when you think about the AI era that we are entering in. I don't feel that that collaboration between, you [00:03:00] know, the, the mission to drive AI related use cases that are secure, right.
[00:03:05] Rupesh Chokshi: That are kind of powering the innovation. I think that's not happening. And part of it is a lot
[00:03:10] Sean Martin: of skunk work still on AI level proof of concepts
[00:03:13] Rupesh Chokshi: that end up being real. Right. Right. Proof of concept people are launching. You know, I was just, uh, talking with, you know, four or five customers, uh, enterprise customers earlier today.
[00:03:22] Rupesh Chokshi: We had a round table and a lot of them were like. You know, hey, we, we got teams that have been chartered and deployed by our CEO by our boat. They have been given funding and they've been asked to go sort of, you know, build out the use cases that will benefit the business, right? So those teams are off.
[00:03:40] Rupesh Chokshi: And running and they have the budgets and the security teams are now being kind of like brought into some of those conversations, but not, you know, hand in hand yet. And, and I think from a budget perspective, you know, I was, again, I feel like the budgets that are being provided to go do. AI are far [00:04:00] greater and a lot of CISOs you talk to are like, Hey, my budgets are more kind of flat, so I'm end up gonna like, you know, shift.
[00:04:08] Rupesh Chokshi: They're, they're not getting the wave of budget that the ai, so the pace of AI and the budgets very significant. You look at even the job market, just the amount of open positions, et cetera, you don't see the same for AI security, right. As an example. So there's a little bit of catching up.
[00:04:26] Sean Martin: That I think we need to do.
[00:04:28] Sean Martin: All right, so now when we did our pre-event chat, yes, we talked to the about a number of things. We, we looked at scraper bots, we looked at, uh, certainly APIs and services continue be a thing, right? Uh, prompt injection, uh, yeah. Output manipulation, and all of those things. So it's somewhat technical in nature, right?
[00:04:48] Sean Martin: Yeah. We're not talking about business operations. No. Those things are, those things are perhaps interfering with them. One of the other things we kind of touched on a little bit was that business operation aspect, right? So how [00:05:00] do CISOs then, perhaps. Leverage the insights you have working with so many customers, AI and other innovations that say, here, here are the levers you can pull.
[00:05:10] Sean Martin: These are the scenarios we're seeing in customers that have, that made that run in ai. Yeah. And now they're, they're experiencing the exposure. They're experiencing the risk. Hopefully not the breaches. Right. Right. Yeah. Um, so what levers can see us pull from a business perspective so that they can get the funds to tackle the things from a technical perspective?
[00:05:30] Sean Martin: Technical perspective? Yeah.
[00:05:31] Rupesh Chokshi: Yeah. I think that's a great question. Great question. And I, you know, the way I would answer that is let's take a, you know, a couple of these scenarios, right? So we've talked about just the amount of AI bot activity, you know, 150 billion, kind of like AI bots. On the network we see every day With a B.
[00:05:52] Rupesh Chokshi: Yeah. With a B. Right. And what they're doing is that they're going to every single digital property, every single enterprise, [00:06:00] scraping the information, bringing it back into the models, training, learning, building it out, et cetera. And then they are sort of like responding or answering to the end users.
[00:06:11] Rupesh Chokshi: Mm-hmm. So many times. The businesses are not even getting the referrals or the leads that have to come from the search engines. Interesting.
[00:06:21] Sean Martin: Right? So that is like, oh my god, severe business is driven by search engine. Right. And market ads and advertising.
[00:06:30] Rupesh Chokshi: You're not getting it because, oh, wow. You know, and, and some of these AI bots and the AI models are also starting to say, okay, I'm gonna read the executive summary and then I'm going to rewrite, you know, some of the article and present it to the user because, you know, they have become that powerful, that intelligent, et cetera.
[00:06:49] Rupesh Chokshi: And. So now we are starting to, so it's not just a a CISO problem because it's nothing to do with, you know, the classic security, right? But what's happening is that [00:07:00] these AI bots are scraping important content, right? And impacting the business models for all of these companies. And a lot of these companies are not even prepared to say, okay, what does it look like?
[00:07:13] Rupesh Chokshi: In the new world. Ah, so let,
[00:07:15] Sean Martin: let's close that loop quick and then we'll go on to how you go. Yeah. 'cause the, just that marketing workflow, right? Um, so the search, the bots are producing the results, presenting a summary of this is what you've been looking for, you don't need to download. Right. That paper that.
[00:07:34] Sean Martin: Or get the trial, you get your answer. Never touch the company. Never touch the company. No interaction with the organization, right? The, the marketing leads drop, right? Perhaps sales drop, is that what you were saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
[00:07:46] Rupesh Chokshi: Yeah, so very concerning, right? Because a lot of the businesses kind of leverage the internet to really kind of, you know, catapult or accelerate, right?
[00:07:56] Rupesh Chokshi: How they would connect with their customers. The buying [00:08:00] cycles and the conversions. Now all of that has been interrupted, right by the AI giants. And in some cases, you know, the AI chat bot might just even respond to the end user and say, Hey, my recommendation is X, Y, Z product. Right? So they're already influencing.
[00:08:19] Rupesh Chokshi: The whole buying cycle or the consuming cycle, which is very concerning. It can be manipulated, of course. There you go. Right? It could be manipulated, it could be poisoned, it could be,
[00:08:31] Sean Martin: you know, played. So how do you have the conversation with business leaders then? Let say these are the scenarios you, you'll likely see.
[00:08:40] Sean Martin: How do they uncover their own scenarios that are important to them?
[00:08:44] Rupesh Chokshi: So I think there are two ask. Effects to it, right? One is that there are a lot of businesses that we work with to say, Hey, we can provide some of the AI bot mitigation strategy so you can block some of this kind of bots from scraping the [00:09:00] information.
[00:09:00] Rupesh Chokshi: We have, you know, product capabilities with content protector and others that are very advanced that can do the blocking. But in some cases you might say, Hey, let me go give them a. A message or something that says, you know, I'm, I'm okay sharing this content because I want to be in the game. Right? But for this content, we need to have some kind of a commercial model, you know, in play.
[00:09:23] Rupesh Chokshi: So we, we see that with the publishing industry. We see that with a lot of companies that are promoting their products on their websites or on their mobile apps, et cetera. So it's a, it's a, it's a changing
[00:09:35] Sean Martin: environment. Right. Now, do these, do these bots, um, are they operating in an independent fashion or are they also acting as a legitimate user and meaning logging in Yeah.
[00:09:50] Sean Martin: Gaining access and things like that? I, I
[00:09:52] Rupesh Chokshi: think both, right. There are, there are genuine search bot that want to kind of search the internet. Uh, [00:10:00] some of the, the AI bots that are a little bit more aggressive, so they might, you know, kind of, uh, find other ways to not even announce themselves. And, and we have seen Claude do that.
[00:10:11] Rupesh Chokshi: We have seen other big companies, uh, do that right to scrape. The content. Uh, and, uh, it's, it's, I think it's, it's very, uh, challenging, you know, because of the fluidity and how the pace is moving. These bots can also open accounts, right? And we are just at the, the tip of the agent workflows. So if you think about the whole idea of an energetic workflow is going to be that you are trusting.
[00:10:40] Rupesh Chokshi: And AI agent, right? To open an account to fulfill a requirement, to book a reservation, to share your credit card information, right? So all of these things kind of going through the entire connected economy is, is what the future is, and security has to play a very big role.
[00:10:59] Sean Martin: So [00:11:00] traditional layers of protection and monitoring and, and alerting probably doesn't fly in this world, right?
[00:11:09] Sean Martin: No. So how, how do you help organizations kind of get a sense of putting in, well under, what are the policies? 'cause there's some things you can do from a policy perspective, as you were describing, but then there are controls, right? And the monitoring and response. How do you help close that loop? Yeah,
[00:11:25] Rupesh Chokshi: yeah.
[00:11:25] Rupesh Chokshi: That's a great, great question. So let's do a couple of, in a specific areas. So every day you see all of the enterprises, you know, rolling out what we call as a conversational AI agents. So AI agents or chat bot that are on their website, they're on their mobile. That is interfacing with a user to book a airline ticket or get information on mortgage or get recommendations on, you know, products.
[00:11:50] Rupesh Chokshi: You know, all of this stuff is happening. And, uh, you know, we see these interactions, you know, the bad guys and the militias, adversaries are taking [00:12:00] advantage of with prompt injection, with jailbreak, with, you know, kind of finding remote code execution, other things to like tinker around with those that. AI agents.
[00:12:11] Rupesh Chokshi: So at Akamai we have the firewall for AI capability, right, which is a purpose bill that says, Hey, if you have a conversational agent that is either externally facing or even internal to your organization, we can sit in line and provide you the, the details of the detections of what is happening. On all of these sessions.
[00:12:33] Rupesh Chokshi: Right? Right. And, and from that sessions, you can decide if you want to deny or you wanna monitor or you wanna modify, but at least you will have visibility. Right. A lot of customers have all of these conversational agents out there. Right. And the users are trusting it. Right. Right. So. You are like, okay, somebody says, Hey, give me your credit card, or gimme the last four digits of your social, right?
[00:12:57] Rupesh Chokshi: The user is like, Hey, I, I'm, I'm comfortable doing [00:13:00] that on the phone, and this chat bot is from the same company. I'm comfortable doing it because I trust the brand. So the whole, you know, the trust of the brand is also very, very important and you wanna build the trust with the user, but. Keep the bad guys out.
[00:13:15] Rupesh Chokshi: Right.
[00:13:16] Sean Martin: And to your point, organizations either play that game or they're gonna get left behind. Yeah, look at the left behind. Yeah. Which means they're gonna have to build agents, they're gonna have to open up APIs and services.
[00:13:29] Rupesh Chokshi: Right.
[00:13:30] Sean Martin: That maybe they don't control the whole ecosystem. Right. Maybe it's an interface.
[00:13:34] Sean Martin: Right. Maybe it's a, I dunno, we can continue to use the, uh, the travel service.
[00:13:39] Rupesh Chokshi: Right?
[00:13:39] Sean Martin: Um, maybe there's a general. Search through an agent or a A model. Yeah. That says here are the agencies to consider. Yep. Yeah. Here, here's the summary of what each one can provide. Right. And then links to, links to those agencies.
[00:13:54] Sean Martin: Yes. And then those agencies have relationships. Perhaps or not with [00:14:00] organizations for airfare and hotels and Right. And here's what's your five day itinerary? How do you get there? Do you need travel? Do you need rental car? And each one is an agent. Yes. Connecting back to a company. Absolutely. Which paints a huge, complex scenario of, that's, that's an ecosystem that nobody's really looking at realistically.
[00:14:22] Sean Martin: There's all the little pieces. Yeah. So how do we, how do we get our hands around that and, you know,
[00:14:26] Rupesh Chokshi: and, and what is the, the governance, what is the framework, you know, which is the, the industry body that says that everybody's gonna work together. Right now, companies are probably pumping out mcps, you know, left, right, and center.
[00:14:39] Rupesh Chokshi: Internal, external. Yep. And saying, Hey, I need to do it because my competitors are doing it. But is that MCP behind the web application firewall? Is it behind the firewall for ai? Is it, you know, being monitored on, on the data exchanges, et cetera? So I think a lot of these challenges are opening up faster than the CISOs [00:15:00] on their teams can react to it.
[00:15:01] Rupesh Chokshi: Right. And, uh, and, uh, I, I am concerned, like I am a very kind of, like pro when it comes to innovation. Yeah. And driving it forward. And I'll give you a couple of examples of my own team. So what we have done internally as a product engineering team has developed our own AI agents and our own AI attack inside.
[00:15:24] Rupesh Chokshi: To give to Akamai customers. Okay. To Akamai. Customers can log in and say, Hey, talk to the WS AI agent and tell me where the bot attacks are happening. What happened in Europe versus America, you know, all of that. The AI agent can do the analysis and bring that back. Or, you know, our attack insights agent can tell them, Hey, if you are an airline, these are the things happening in the airline industry.
[00:15:48] Rupesh Chokshi: Okay. So a lot of powerful ways of changing the user experience, the customer experience. Right. But all of that has to be done with security at the, at the center
[00:15:58] Sean Martin: of it. Yeah. [00:16:00] So that. I mean, that's interesting. So you, you have that data. Yes. And I know you, and it's a traditional thing in this industry that produce reports.
[00:16:07] Sean Martin: Right. That demonstrate what's happening, what are the trends, what the future might look like. Right? Right. You've exposed that data through agents and models now. Right, right. Yeah. In a very controlled Yeah. But depending on the, your customer's right. Situation. Yep. Question from the board, right? Question from the executive leadership team.
[00:16:27] Sean Martin: They can go in and, yeah, just hit the news. What are we, what are we exposed to? Based on what you're seeing? Yes, absolutely.
[00:16:34] Rupesh Chokshi: Absolutely. So we do that on a per customer basis. So we put all the security boundaries and provide that. But then, you know, we also show some of the spinning globe capabilities, which is global in nature.
[00:16:45] Rupesh Chokshi: Okay. Which then talks about how Akamai's platform is seeing everything on a global basis. So where are we seeing all the, you know, web application attacks? Where are we seeing the API attacks? Where are we seeing the bot [00:17:00] attacks? And we have the ability to kind of zoom in, zoom out, you know, et cetera on a global level.
[00:17:05] Rupesh Chokshi: So very powerful threat intelligence, very powerful visualization. And then, you know, behind the, behind the authenticated layer, we have very customer centric capabilities.
[00:17:18] Sean Martin: I want to see it. Yes. Sounds cool. Exciting, exciting
[00:17:21] Rupesh Chokshi: times.
[00:17:21] Sean Martin: Yes. Well, I want, I want to thank you. You, you joined us on a webinar prior to this event and you shared a lot of insights on what Yeah, what we might hear and see this week.
[00:17:29] Sean Martin: And you also presented, uh, a forward looking view of where things might be headed. Um, I want to, so I'm gonna invite people to listen to that 'cause there's a lot of great information. We have some great insights there. Yeah. Um, I wanna use this last moment to maybe speak to the security leadership. Uh, folks, how, how do they get, I, I feel we're in a, in a place where security is forced to be the department of no or accept the risk.
[00:17:58] Sean Martin: But I think, [00:18:00] I think there's a balance that can be had there. So how do, how does security leaders have a conversation that says, we want to be part of this. We don't want to. Stop you, but we wanna, right. We wanna help, yeah. Achieve the outcomes here that you're getting. Yeah.
[00:18:15] Rupesh Chokshi: Yeah. So my message to the security leadership is the following, right?
[00:18:18] Rupesh Chokshi: If you think about every enterprise, every company, you know, before it was like every company is a data company, right? Every company is a tech company. Every company is a software company. Every company is an AI company now, right? And we cannot afford security to be an afterthought. Right. Just the pace of digitization that is happening right, is, is just insane.
[00:18:42] Rupesh Chokshi: So we all need to come together as an industry, have the frameworks, have the governance, the risk, the knowledge sharing. But we need to push the boards that you can. Don't think of security as a, as a line item on the budget, right? This is the, your [00:19:00] brand. This is your future. This is your innovation engine.
[00:19:03] Rupesh Chokshi: How fast can it go? So take all of that in mind.
[00:19:06] Sean Martin: Perfect.
[00:19:08] Rupesh Chokshi: Rupesh
[00:19:10] Sean Martin: great. It's always a pleasure, my friend. Yes, same here. I really enjoy chatting with you. Yes, same here all the time. Yep. Everybody, thanks for listening and, uh, watching this conversation with the one and only Rupesh Jackson. And, uh, do connect the Akamai team.
[00:19:23] Sean Martin: Take, take his advice, get the business' attention, and, uh. And bring security into all these AI innovations that are happening, right? It's an exciting time. Let's, uh, let's leverage the folks that yeah. Know what's going on so we can, uh, achieve that success, uh, securely. Yep.
[00:19:38] Rupesh Chokshi: Yep. Sounds good. We are here as a trusted partner, but thank you so much for having on the thank you on this chit chat.
[00:19:43] Rupesh Chokshi: Appreciate it. Yes. And, and a lot of good insights for the
[00:19:46] Sean Martin: viewers, right? Yeah, absolutely always. And stay tuned. Uh, itsp magazine.com/bh USA 25 for all of our conversations here from Las Vegas. Thanks everybody.