CISA chief AI officer follow-up: Current state of the role (and where it’s heading) – Security Intelligence

On August 1, 2024, CISA announced that it had appointed Lisa Einstein as its first chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO). Einstein has worked with the organization since September 2022, when she served as a senior advisor of CISA’s AI division and the executive director of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.
In recent years, CISA has placed significant focus on its cyber defense mission of establishing ethical and safe AI development and adoption practices across the United States. This new appointment is a clear sign that the organization is still committed to fulfilling this important obligation.
While CISA wasn’t fully transparent about the exact responsibilities or core focuses Einstein will be taking on in her new role, some of the comments made by CISA Director Jen Easterly and directly from Einstein herself shed some light on where CISA’s focus is leaning with this new role addition.
Commenting during the recent announcement, Easterly stated, “I am proud of how our team at CISA has come together in the last two years to understand and respond to rapid advancements in AI — many of which have significant implications for our core missions of cyber defense and critical infrastructure security.”
Additionally, Easterly spoke about Einstein’s new appointment, stating that she “could not be more thrilled to have her take on this important new role, which will help us continue to build AI expertise into the fabric of our agency and ensure we are equipped to effectively leverage the power of AI well into the future.”
Easterly’s comments speak to CISA’s priorities over the past couple of years, especially regarding the potential dangers that AI-driven technologies represent to both public and private organizations. This still looks to be a primary consideration in this appointment and suggests that Einstein’s core responsibilities will be primarily security-focused.
However, Easterly also spoke about Einstein’s capabilities associated with helping the organization better leverage AI moving forward, suggesting that her new position may blend certain elements commonly seen in CISO (chief information security officer) and CTO (chief technology officer) roles.
While there are still some gray areas associated with Einstein’s priorities in her new role throughout the rest of this year and into the next, it’s possible to get some additional clarity here by examining how common CAIOs are in other organizations and how the role is typically defined.
Traditionally, C-suite positions have always been broad in their design, with roles like CISO and CTO taking responsibility for the implementation and management of a wide range of tools, services and best practices. The idea of centering C-suite responsibilities around a specific disruptive technology was unheard of and would have been hard to justify budgeting around.
However, times are changing fast, and the CAIO role is starting to see a spike in demand across multiple industries. According to an AI Priorities Study by Foundry in 2023, 11% of midsize to large organizations have already appointed chief AI officers, with 21% of organizations actively looking to fill the role.
As with all roles within an organization, each business may define the role of a chief AI officer differently. However, the majority of organizations place a CAIO’s focus on the following areas:
CAIOs are becoming an important bridge to technical teams and business stakeholders, helping to make sure that the organization’s AI initiatives not only support an organization’s primary objectives but that its implications and limitations are fully understood by everyone.
So far, CISA has been more than transparent about the organization’s progress in important initiatives like the National Cybersecurity Strategy and the supporting National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan. We can only assume that in the coming months, CISA will extend this level of transparency to assigned priorities and critical objectives that Einstein will be charged with in her newly assigned CAIO role.
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