The Good, the Sad and the Ugly: What Research Reveals About AI Safety and Security Gaps and Options
About This Session
How can a CISO or risk officer be confident that their AI-enabled applications are safe and secure?
TELUS Digital recently completed more than 650k adversarial tests on 34 leading AI models. We will talk about how the vendor, model size, country-of-origin, reasoning capabilities, openness, and other factors impact AI safety and security. Importantly, we will also discuss how that translates into what CISOs should focus on when evaluating AI apps, both before launch and in production.
We will also review our latest research around AI agent testing and the gaps in current practices that result in avoidable risk. And we will review a recent survey of CISOs regarding their AI safety and security practices, as well as data from testing AI-enabled applications that consume more than 2T AI tokens annually.
TELUS Digital's AI Research Labs have published extensive research on AI safety and security in technical journals and conferences, built AI models that have compromised every AI model they've encountered, and worked directly with CISOs on how to automate testing, validation, and auditing of the safety and security of AI-powered systems.
The goal of this talk will be to offer data-driven insights about actual AI risks seen in the field, techniques that make a difference in vulnerability discovery, and straightforward steps that telcos, airlines, healthcare providers, and financial services companies have taken to proactively reduce risk and instill confidence in their AI investments, without increasing the burden on CISO organizations.
The presentation will provide specific data, concrete examples, and specific recommendations, while avoiding generalizations.
TELUS Digital recently completed more than 650k adversarial tests on 34 leading AI models. We will talk about how the vendor, model size, country-of-origin, reasoning capabilities, openness, and other factors impact AI safety and security. Importantly, we will also discuss how that translates into what CISOs should focus on when evaluating AI apps, both before launch and in production.
We will also review our latest research around AI agent testing and the gaps in current practices that result in avoidable risk. And we will review a recent survey of CISOs regarding their AI safety and security practices, as well as data from testing AI-enabled applications that consume more than 2T AI tokens annually.
TELUS Digital's AI Research Labs have published extensive research on AI safety and security in technical journals and conferences, built AI models that have compromised every AI model they've encountered, and worked directly with CISOs on how to automate testing, validation, and auditing of the safety and security of AI-powered systems.
The goal of this talk will be to offer data-driven insights about actual AI risks seen in the field, techniques that make a difference in vulnerability discovery, and straightforward steps that telcos, airlines, healthcare providers, and financial services companies have taken to proactively reduce risk and instill confidence in their AI investments, without increasing the burden on CISO organizations.
The presentation will provide specific data, concrete examples, and specific recommendations, while avoiding generalizations.
Speaker
Bret Kinsella
Senior Vice President & General Manager - TELUS Digital
Bret Kinsella is SVP of AI Research and Products, and General Manager of Fuel iX at TELUS Digital. TELUS and TELUS Digital AI-enabled applications generated over $100 million in benefits and processed more than 2 trillion AI tokens in 2025 across AI security, customer experience, and general-purpose productivity use cases.
Bret has more than 350 academic citations on Google Scholar, and he founded Voicebot.ai, the most-cited source of technical analysis and news on generative and conversational AI between 2016 and 2024. He has keynoted technology conferences in the U.S. and Europe, including CES and Mobile World Congress.
He has also served as a guest columnist for Harvard Business Review, USA Today, WIRED, and VentureBeat. Bret is a graduate of UCLA and the Wharton School.
Bret has more than 350 academic citations on Google Scholar, and he founded Voicebot.ai, the most-cited source of technical analysis and news on generative and conversational AI between 2016 and 2024. He has keynoted technology conferences in the U.S. and Europe, including CES and Mobile World Congress.
He has also served as a guest columnist for Harvard Business Review, USA Today, WIRED, and VentureBeat. Bret is a graduate of UCLA and the Wharton School.
