Innovation Without Compromise: IT’s Role in Securing the AI Future w/ Taison Kearney

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How are today’s IT leaders adapting to the breakneck pace of AI and cybersecurity evolution? In this episode of The Professional Services Pursuit, host Banoo welcomes Taison Kearney, Chief Information Security Officer and Data Protection Officer at Kantata. With over two decades of experience, Taison shares how IT teams are shifting from traditional support roles to become strategic drivers in AI governance and cybersecurity leadership.

This conversation offers a front-line view into the challenges and opportunities that come with AI adoption, from managing risk and “shadow AI” to building future-ready security teams and becoming a trusted advisor to clients.

Key Topics Covered:

The benefits and risks of enterprise AI adoption
How the CISO role is expanding in the era of AI
Building a proactive, secure, and AI-savvy IT culture
Earning client trust through strategic security partnership

The specific risks facing professional services firms, and how data centralization helps mitigate them

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Banoo Behboodi

Vice President, Success Engineering

Banoo Behboodi is a 20+ year software and services leader with extensive experience executing change initiatives with oversight of Customer Success, Professional Services and Delivery and Consulting functions. Banoo’s earlier experiences with AT&T Mobility, Coca-Cola Company and Ernst & Young leading key transformational and compliance projects, provided the foundation needed to be an effective leader and a change agent with a customer first mindset. Banoo is passionate about driving continuous improvement through sharing best practices and empowering resources through technology and analytics to optimize performance and job satisfaction while driving business outcomes.

Brent Trimble

Vice President, Value Engineering

Brent brings more than 15+ year’s of leadership experience in Management Consulting, Strategic Delivery, Marketing services and product development firms to his technology role at Kantata. As the VP of Value Engineering and the Managing Director of Marketing Service & Agency Vertical, he specializes in identifying process improvement potential, business optimization and key health metrics for alignment and orientation.

With deep business understanding through an operator lens - Brent works with Kantata partner firms to refine intrinsic and extrinsic value drivers - giving firm principals the focus required for adoption, mobilization, value realization and ultimately - success.

Prior to joining Kantata, Brent was a client of the platform and held positions at Interpublic Group, Accenture, WPP, and independent marketing consulting firms.