The leadership aspect all AI-driven CEOs need to know [Newsletter #47]

Hello, AI enthusiasts from all around the world! Welcome to this week’s newsletter for the AI and the Future of Work podcast.

Many of us dream of using AI to its fullest potential to free up time and focus on the kinds of problems only humans can solve.

But to get there, we need to learn. A lot. That’s the only way we’ll truly unlock everything that AI tools can offer.

Learning is a crucial step, but not only for mastering AI tools. It's also a vital aspect of leadership. 

Today's issue is all about understanding that leaders need to start from the bottom and earn their right to lead a team. 

We also discuss how cybersecurity will become a crucial part of AI teams in the future, and why leaders can’t afford to leave it out of their daily decisions.

Let’s dive into this week’s highlights! 🚀

🎙️ New Podcast Episode With Snehal Antani, Horizon3 CEO

Imagine you're a senior engineer or a business leader.

You could have unlimited interns at your beck and call. But they wouldn’t be human. They would be AI and agentic workflows. That’s what AI offers today: digital help that frees up time for more meaningful work. 

In the near future, those benefits could go even further by giving us more space to mentor our teams, head home earlier, or solve the kinds of problems only humans can solve.

But according to Snehal Antani, there’s a catch: 

Getting to that point takes work. You can’t rush leadership. You have to build your way there, step by step. From developing technical skills to understanding products, managing teams, scaling go-to-market efforts, and making decisions in high-pressure situations.

Snehal calls this ‘building with Lego blocks”. Each block represents real experience. And it’s only after stacking enough of them that we earn the right to lead others and use AI effectively across our teams.

Snehal is the CEO and co‑founder of Horizon3, a cybersecurity company that uses AI to simulate real‑world attacks on client systems and expose weak spots before criminals do. Experts call this approach red teaming and penetration testing.

Before that, he served as a Highly Qualified Expert (HQE) within the Joint Special Operations Command, and held roles including CTO and SVP at Splunk and CIO at GE Capital.

In this week’s episode of AI and the Future of Work, he sat down with Dan Turchin, PeopleReign CEO, to talk about AI and cybersecurity. But what emerged was a deeply personal conversation about leadership, rooted in the grit and values Snehal learned from his father.

They covered a lot, including:

• Why founders and leaders need to build a broad, diverse skill set before taking on higher-level roles.

• How Snehal’s experience as a CIO inspired Horizon3’s mission.

• Why cybersecurity will be a non-negotiable foundation for future AI teams.

• And how, by 2035, Snehal believes the workforce may split into two groups: those who become force multipliers with AI, and those who do not.

🎧 Our latest AI and the Future of Work podcast episode featuring Snehal Antani inspired this issue. Listen to the full episode here to learn more about how Snehal Antani wants to integrate cybersecurity into AI to ensure a safer future for everyone.  

📖 AI Fun Fact Article

The year 2025 is shaping up to be a turning point for AI, for better or worse.

It has never been easier for adversaries to use AI to their advantage. Bad actors are weaponizing large language models (LLMs) to create fraudulent bots and automate attacks.

Enterprises are among the main targets, but they also have the opportunity to lead in using AI for good.

Louis Columbus, writing in VentureBeat, explains how quickly this threat is growing. Adversaries are using generative AI to create malware that doesn’t produce a unique signature. Instead, it relies on fileless execution, which often makes these attacks invisible to traditional detection systems.

Even more concerning is how attackers are exploiting human vulnerabilities at scale.

Generative AI is being used for automated phishing campaigns and large-scale social engineering efforts, targeting both individuals and organizations.

What makes this even more difficult to defend against is the nature of AI-powered attacks. They are not isolated events. They operate as an ongoing cycle of reconnaissance, evasion, and adaptation.

This isn’t entirely new. Attackers have been using AI for years.

But 2025 is expected to be the year when defenders begin to fully unlock AI’s potential in response.

Dan Turchin, PeopleReign CEO, believes that bad actors have always existed within and beyond the cyber realm, and social engineering is the biggest threat vector. 

Within the cyber realm, they'll always exploit human and technology vulnerabilities. Security training is more critical than ever, to make it harder for criminals to use ransom tactics and shadow currencies to benefit from successful attacks. 

This problem extends beyond cybersecurity, too. Thankfully, the brightest minds in tech and policy are working hard to stay a step ahead.

Worth a Read! 📚

📣 Share your Thoughts and Leave a Review!

Until next time, stay curious! 🤔

That's a Wrap for This Week!

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