Every role in cybersecurity is changing fast, but most practitioners are still treating AI like a glorified search engine. In this solo episode of Secured, Cole Cornford shares his unfiltered take on three things on his mind right now: entrepreneurship in a tough market, the growing threat to SaaS product businesses from roll your own culture, and why the cyber industry needs a fundamentally different approach to AI.

Cole makes the case that saying "hey Claude" is the least effective way to work with AI today, and that the real conversation has nothing to do with which model you pick. It is about how you interact with it, how you build a harness around it, and how you stop letting third party wrappers make all the decisions for you. He also shares early thinking on an AI course he is building for security professionals, covering AI fundamentals, using AI for security, and securing AI products.

Along the way he tackles the rule of three as a framework for prioritising in a small business, why product moats are disappearing fast, and what qualities he is actually looking for when hiring graduates in a market where everyone is cutting them.