In an exclusive email interview with CIO&Leader, Diwakar Dayal, Managing Director & AVP – India & SAARC at SentinelOne, discusses the evolving landscape of cybersecurity in the age of AI.
CIO & Leader: What are the most urgent threats like prompt injection or data leakage that traditional cybersecurity frameworks simply can’t handle?
Diwakar Dayal: AI-driven threats such as prompt injection and data leakage occur at speeds and scales that can surpass traditional signature-based or rule-driven security tools. These attacks exploit the dynamic and open nature of AI systems and LLMs, often bypassing controls designed for older architectures. Defending against these threats requires real-time monitoring of prompts and API activity, advanced anomaly detection across AI-assisted workflows, and autonomous enforcement mechanisms that traditional frameworks lack. SentinelOne’s platform integrates specialized capabilities to address these new vectors, providing continuous visibility and enforcement at every step of the digital workflow.
CIO & Leader: How do you prevent AI misuse without slowing innovation or stifling experimentation across enterprise teams?
Diwakar Dayal: Balancing innovation with risk is critical. Rather than restricting access, SentinelOne empowers organizations with granular, policy-based controls that allow for the safe exploration and deployment of AI tools. These controls can redact or tokenize sensitive data in real-time, block high-risk prompts, and provide users with inline coaching, helping teams learn safe AI practices without sacrificing productivity. The aim is to create an environment where responsible AI usage becomes a business enabler, not a hindrance.
CIO & Leader: How does SentinelOne help CISOs discover, monitor, and govern this shadow AI ecosystem before it becomes a compliance or data risk nightmare?
Diwakar Dayal: SentinelOne offers real-time AI visibility and control, automatically discovering both sanctioned and unsanctioned “shadow AI” applications in use across endpoints, browsers, and developer environments. Our lightweight agents and browser extensions play a crucial role in the process. They actively scan and identify all AI applications and models in use, whether they are officially sanctioned or part of shadow AI practices. These tools log details of prompts sent to AI systems and responses received, creating an auditable record. This comprehensive logging enables teams to review and monitor AI activities. Additionally, we enforce data governance policies such as redacting sensitive information and setting access controls that help ensure compliance with regulations and prevent data leaks. This layered approach provides visibility into AI tool usage, allows continuous oversight, and reduces the risk of data exposure or regulatory breaches. This proactive approach helps CISOs maintain oversight and governance of AI usage before it escalates into an operational or compliance challenge
CIO & Leader: How are you helping global enterprises maintain compliance and control across diverse AI ecosystems and jurisdictions?
Diwakar Dayal: Global organizations face a patchwork of regulatory requirements related to data residency, privacy, and acceptable AI use. Our platform is designed to provide policy-driven, model-agnostic safeguards that can be tailored per jurisdiction, enabling detection, response, and reporting that align with local and international regulations. By automatically enforcing organizational controls over any LLM provider on-premises or SaaS, SentinelOne simplifies compliance for modern multi-cloud, multi-region enterprises.
CIO & Leader: How do the acquisitions of Prompt Security and Observo AI strengthen your position as a leader in AI-driven security and how will you integrate these capabilities without creating complexity for customers?
Diwakar Dayal: The acquisition of Prompt Security extends our capabilities into generative AI and LLM governance, providing visibility and control at the intersection of employee productivity and data security. Observo AI enhances our threat detection and autonomous response, particularly across cloud and API-driven environments. Both are highly complementary to the Singularity platform, and our integration focus is on delivering a unified, intuitive experience where advanced controls work seamlessly in the background, without adding operational burden or complexity for end-users.
CIO & Leader: What does an effective defense strategy against AI-powered attackers look like?
Diwakar Dayal: Effective defense against AI-powered threats must fuse continuous visibility, machine-speed detection, autonomous response, and threat intelligence. This means deploying platforms that can correlate behavioral signals across the digital estate endpoint, identity, cloud, and network and trigger preemptive remediation actions automatically. Collaborative intelligence, where organizations and partners share and learn from threat data, is also key to staying ahead.
CIO & Leader: How do you see the role of AI-native security evolving from reactive defense to proactive digital resilience in the next 2–3 years?
Diwakar Dayal: AI-native security is rapidly moving from reactive incident response to a proactive, resilience-driven model. In the coming years, we expect to see increased investments in AI that predict and prevent threats before they cause disruption, not just respond to them. Continuous learning from both internal operations and the broader threat landscape will enable organizations to anticipate adversary tactics and dynamically strengthen defenses, making digital ecosystems not just secure, but truly resilient.