From Geek to Star #28 - AI to bring your expertise or experience forward

If you missed the previous episodes, you can access them online here.

🗓️ This Week – Episode 28: use AI to structure your thoughts and help you to communicate with impact.

This week I will take you on the topic of cybersecurity. Not as an expert, but as a Tech Executive, who is bringing an executive view on this topic, leveraged by AI to bring the story together.

It started about 6 months ago. At a Forrester roundtable I was invited on the topic of cybersecurity and the trends with AI. One thing that struck me then was the topic of IAM (Identity Access Management). As a senior tech executive, I’ve often seen this in my career: the onboarding process of people into systems, the access right management, the onboarding process is often very clumsy, manual and prone to errors. Especially with shadow IT and the use of SaaS solutions not fully integrated in the Active Directory environment of the company, you end up having people leaving a company with still access to some tools from the company (Google analytics, Miro, etc…). This is already a concern, but now think agentic AI with a proliferation of agent accounts? Companies are clearly not prepared to manage an explosion of these accounts, with different access rights and so forth, like what this article mentions. This was the first signal.

The second signal that I got around cybersecurity was about a month ago, as I was starting to prepare for a roundtable discussion in which I would be the moderator, on “The Future of Tech Jobs”, I looked for some data around existing tech jobs. I found out a report of 2024 by ISC2, the world's leading nonprofit member association for cybersecurity professionals, mentioning it is estimated there is around 5.5 million cybersecurity professionals in the world, and that it is estimated there is a gap of 5 more million cybersecurity professional needed 😳

The third signal I received was this week, discussing with a CIO who also owns his own cybersecurity company on another side. He was mentioning how worrying it is to see the tsunami of cyberattacks rising with AI on one side, while on the other side companies are still doing security in a very traditional way and just hoping that their security editors which now all label their solutions as “AI-driven” will be able to contain the threats. 

And then came the news, in this Google Threat Intelligence report, dated November 6 2025: malware are now capable of mutating automatically using GenAI. The Tsunami is coming, led by crime organizations, State-sponsored actors targeting companies but also nations.    

🔐 I am not a cybersecurity expert, but I am a tech executive

As Sun Tzu wrote, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” On this topic of cyber, this has been bothering me for some time, seeing that so many C-level executives are very much ignorant of the enemy's rising capabilities. As a tech executive, it is in my scope to understand the overall impact and risks around cybersecurity. And I also think it is my responsibility to spread awareness for the greater good, whether in my company or beyond. 

In the present case, with my new venture “The Way Forward", I am currently solo 🙂 so I thought about how to bring this topic outside. My experience as a tech executive is that cybersecurity is often overlooked by C-level and board until something goes wrong. And on the other hand, cybersecurity departments often have a defensive stance (quite logical) which does not gain them a lot of positive recognition, being labelled as the people who always say no (like legal teams!). On such a topic, senior tech executives, beyond the CISOs, must also help to bridge the gap, helping boards to better understand what is at stake, and helping security teams to become more proactive. 

So I decided to write a C-level 5 pagers based on my experience but also on the 3-4 reliable sources on the topic I mentioned above, using NotebookLM and then structuring myself the final output. I did this for myself, to help me structure my leader's view on this first - if you are interested in this 5-pagers, hit reply to this email, I will gladly share it with you.

Then I thought, “ok, to raise awareness on this topic, what is the best way to bring it beyond my solo venture?”. Probably Linkedin. But no one would read a 5-pagers I would post on Linkedin, right? And then (this is serendipity!), NotebookLM announced earlier this week a new feature: generating a video based on sources. So I gave it a try and was super impressed by what it did based on my 5 pagers: a bite sized video that I then just need to put in Capcut to add subtitles. And here you go, sharing this video for awareness to a larger audience on Linkedin (stay tune on my Linkedin post on this in the coming days!).

🤖Bottom line: use AI to help you structure your thoughts and generate the right media for your audience

If you look at it, the whole process took me 6 months - not a real problem because it is just one of my thought leadership exercise:

• 6 months for my thoughts and convictions to mature on this topic

• 2 hours of working on my C-level exec report - reading the 3-4 reports I find insightful, using NotebookLM to generate a first draft with my prompt and then checking the facts and adjusting with my thoughts

• 10 minutes of video generation by NotebookLM just based on my report. Clearly I would not be able to generate this (scripting, scenario, animation) in less than a week if I should do it myself or to have it for a few hundred dollars if I should pay a freelancer to do it (without AI).

People may boast about “it took me just 10 minutes” to generate a full video (like what I did), But here is the difference between the one who will just copy and paste some information he/she did not take the time to assimilate, and the one who will have spent time thinking / working on the topic: stickiness in the brain to become more relevant on the topic. 

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

What is the topic you currently have in mind which would move the needle forward if people were more aware about that and how can you make it more visible than just in your mind?

Reply to this email, I read every note.

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✨ May the SHINE be with you!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward