AI Security

When I joined Onyx Security as its founding marketer, the honest answer to "what does your company do?" took about four minutes to explain properly. There was no analyst quadrant to reference, no established buyer vocabulary to borrow from, no competitive landscape that had settled into predictable shapes. There was a real problem enterprises were accumulating faster than they understood, and a product built to address it. My job was to turn that into a story a CISO could act on.

That's a different kind of marketing challenge than most. When the category exists, the work is differentiation. When it doesn't, the work is education first, differentiation second. You have to make the problem legible before you can make the solution relevant.

The problem

The problem is real and accelerating. Employees are connecting company data to AI tools IT never approved. Engineering teams are building on models whose data handling nobody has audited. Agentic workflows are making autonomous decisions with access to sensitive systems. And most enterprise security programs were not designed with any of this in mind. The gap between how fast AI is being adopted and how well it is being governed is the space this company operates in.

The audience is CISOs and their teams. They are not naive about AI risk. Most of them are already getting questions from their boards. The challenge is not awareness; it is specificity. A CISO needs something concrete enough to justify budget, defensible enough to present to a technical team, and clear enough to explain to a board that understands liability better than technology. That is the messaging problem I work on every day.

Building from zero

The work spans everything a founding marketer has to build: positioning and messaging architecture, persona definitions, content strategy, competitive intelligence, analyst and media relationships, event presence, and sales enablement for a team that is selling something buyers do not yet have a procurement process for. None of the infrastructure that established marketing teams take for granted exists yet. Each piece has to be built, tested against real customer conversations, and refined.

Why this moment matters

Enterprise AI governance is going to be a significant security category. The organizations that define what good looks like in this space, including the companies and marketers that show up early and tell a coherent story, will have a durable advantage. The CISOs who will shape enterprise AI security policy for the next decade are already in rooms having these conversations. We are in those rooms. Getting the narrative right now is not just a marketing priority. It is a competitive one.

I came to this role with twenty years of enterprise IT and security behind me. That matters because the product touches every layer of the stack: network traffic, API calls, identity, data classification, model behavior, agentic permissions. Understanding how those layers actually work in a production enterprise environment is what separates messaging that lands from messaging that sounds like it was written from a press release.