In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Practitioner Series, Anand Pradhan, head of the AI Center of Excellence and Mortgage Data Group at ICE, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the critical shift from AI strategy to enterprise execution. Pradhan shares how the Intercontinental Exchange is moving generative and agentic AI into production at scale within a highly regulated environment. He unpacks the realities of building with AI agents, emphasizing that they are simply another layer in the software stack that still requires rigorous evaluation and careful token economics. Pradhan also details ICE's unwavering commitment to security, highlighting how their infrastructure and InfoSec teams deploy strict controls, data loss prevention and continuous monitoring to safely harness both proprietary models and external LLMs.
The conversation also explores the pragmatic application of AI in enterprise workflows and its realistic impact on established SaaS platforms. Pradhan dispels the hype that AI will immediately replace complex transactional systems or systems of record, noting instead its power to enhance front-end interactivity, automate deterministic flows and dramatically improve data quality. By championing a culture of education and providing secure AI tools to employees, Pradhan illustrates how organizations can push the boundaries of innovation while strictly adhering to regulatory guardrails and maintaining essential human-in-the-loop oversight.
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Shyam Bhojwani, Nextdoor
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Practitioner Series, Anand Pradhan, head of the AI Center of Excellence and Mortgage Data Group at ICE, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the critical shift from AI strategy to enterprise execution. Pradhan shares how the Intercontinental Exchange is moving generative and agentic AI into production at scale within a highly regulated environment. He unpacks the realities of building with AI agents, emphasizing that they are simply another layer in the software stack that still requires rigorous evaluation and careful token economics. Pradhan also details ICE's unwavering commitment to security, highlighting how their infrastructure and InfoSec teams deploy strict controls, data loss prevention and continuous monitoring to safely harness both proprietary models and external LLMs.
The conversation also explores the pragmatic application of AI in enterprise workflows and its realistic impact on established SaaS platforms. Pradhan dispels the hype that AI will immediately replace complex transactional systems or systems of record, noting instead its power to enhance front-end interactivity, automate deterministic flows and dramatically improve data quality. By championing a culture of education and providing secure AI tools to employees, Pradhan illustrates how organizations can push the boundaries of innovation while strictly adhering to regulatory guardrails and maintaining essential human-in-the-loop oversight.
In this interview from the theCUBE + NYSE Wired Practitioner Series, Shyam Bhojwani, chief information officer and chief information security officer of Nextdoor, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how the converging CIO and CISO role is shaping responsible AI adoption and agent governance in the enterprise. Bhojwani explains how holding both titles forces security-first thinking into every deployment decision — a structural advantage as AI agents proliferate well beyond IT's traditional boundaries. He describes Nextdoor's deliberate AI strategy: buildin...Read more
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How are organizations securing AI — particularly the new post–generative-AI reasoning agents that perform tasks — and how do you manage risks like agent sprawl while balancing innovation and business needs?add
How is Nextdoor approaching and implementing AI across its platform and internal operations?add
What are the main concerns and recommended actions regarding agents, and what keeps you up at night about them?add
>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at our NYSE CUBE Studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is part of our NYSE Wired program. It's a CUBE original, but an open community of practitioners, experts sharing their knowledge. This is part of our practitioners, we got a great guest here, a leader in CIO and CISO area. Shyam Bhojwani at Nextdoor. Welcome to theCUBE.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Thank you for having me.
John Furrier
>> So I have to talk about your role because you have two titles that are highly attractive, CIO and CISO, which means you got the chief information officer and chief information security officer.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> You could say they blended a while ago, but now you have them out there. What's your role? What do you do?
Shyam Bhojwani
>> So I'll talk about my role in two parts. My CIO role is corporate applications, business applications like CRM, ERP, corporate IT, martech. And the other half is cybersecurity. So product security, app security. And the thing I like about my job is I have to always think about security, so which makes my decisioning deployment easier. So I enjoy what I do. And very automation AI centric.
John Furrier
>> And you're always getting hacked. The threats are endless.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Endless.
John Furrier
>> RSA is happening this week in San Francisco. We have full team coverage out there. And the AI agent conversation, two years ago, they all hated agents. Last year they liked agents. This year, the reality is that they love agents, but they hate it at the same time. So it's like, I hated it. I love it. Now it's a love/hate. Because there's now so many more security things to go after and look after and OpenClaw creating a frenzy. Yep. Anyone under the age of 30 is doing OpenClaw. It's like drugs. And it's like tech drugs. It's like, "I'm OpenClaw." And kicks to my email. Okay. Try to put that into an enterprise, it's very difficult. But it's directionally where we see things. You would agree. So how is AI being secured? Because this is not secure, but what is the thinking around how to frame these new post generative AI reasoning, agents, doing tasks? It's almost like human security.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> No, no, for sure. And I was at the RSA conference, so I just got from there. I think AI from a security lens, it's helping because your detection time has gone down. But to your point, it's also creating more headaches in a nice way. It's a good problem to solve. And the real challenge is now before things were centralized, IT used to create more agents. Now your marketing head, your CRM, they are creating agents. So it's this agent sprawl that's very common. But I think with the right guardrails, if you have good inventory systems, I think that's what we are trying to follow. But to your point, yes, it's a big headache. And my job is to take a balanced approach. You don't want to say no, but you also don't want to say yes easily. And you have to work with the business.
John Furrier
>> How have you guys thought about the platform at Nextdoor during this transition? I think the threshold's been crossed with AI. So it's not a strategy risk anymore because it's pretty much, you got to infuse AI. There's so many benefits. The list is endless in terms of opportunities and the list that we don't even see yet is coming. So you have to be ready. So what is your thinking around the transformation side of the platform? What's been the upgrades? What's the thought process of where AI fits in? Because you got a lot of users, you got collective intelligence, you got data acquisition, you have all kinds of opportunities.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Right. No, no, for sure. So I'll talk about like AI from my side of the world and the platform. I think what we are doing is we've made investments in certain tools. So what we thought is do we need a vertical layer or a horizontal layer? What I mean by that is for us to make our platform better, our internal employees need to be productive, right? So we were like, "Should we get point to point AI solution or should we get a layer on top of this?" So we got enterprise search, that was a good building block. Then we started building agents on top of it because now it's easy. You got the information, you're able to build agents, and now we are going towards orchestration, right? I think it's been a journey. It's been a very thoughtful journey for us. And when I think about Nextdoor as a platform, we use AI, right? It's not a hidden thing, but we are being very smart, thoughtful about, we don't want to make it very, how do I say it? Boring for users because there's also this AI fatigue that's happening in the industry, but the goal is thoughtful, build the right foundation, and it needs to be ROI driven. If you don't, just getting AI for the sake of getting it won't take you further.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting. I always love the premise of Nextdoor because I've been a big proponent of communities and knowing your neighbor. And so love the metaphor of having a neighborhood kind of connection because... And it seems like in the age of digital, you lose sight of who your neighbor is.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> Just the mission itself is just solid. I think one of the things I would think AI would be good for is to knowing who the neighbors you actually want to hang out with.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Hang out with.
John Furrier
>> Or, "Oh, she's always bitching and moaning about this, that, and the other. Dog on the lawn." There's always the neighborhood things. "Get off my lawn to who has some free things or... So there's a lot of transactional things going on when you have the relationship of a neighborhood or town or city. Where is AI? Where do you think AI is going to help there? Obviously the spam stuff is clear. You can knock that stuff down and misinformation. Where's the AI going to be the utility from a personal standpoint? What's your thoughts on that?
Shyam Bhojwani
>> I think for us, to the point you made, community knowing. So we have something called Faves, which is part of our platform where let's say you ask a question about who's the best plumber in your neighborhood. So you just don't want AI to give you a very fluffy answer. You want that answer to come based on recommendation from your neighbors, right? So like personalization, giving more thoughtful answers, but using the AI technology. I think that's where this whole industry is shifting. And like I said, you want this experience to be very organic, not very fluffy.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. And security is a huge concern.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> People don't want to get doxxed, but also at the same time, they want to do sharing.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> And how do you think about securing the community?
Shyam Bhojwani
>> I think security is in built as part of our mission. So what we are doing is, again, security is a blessing, also a curse because now for attackers, hackers, it's easy to create fake accounts, create random posts. So I think whatever we build, security is first thing we consider. That's one. And we are using security to our advantage as much as possible because bad actors won't disappear. I think the number is increasing. So we have to be vigilant, thoughtful and not put our guard down.
John Furrier
>> It's certainly a threat vector for sure.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Yep. A big one.
John Furrier
>> It's a big one. On the agents, what's your thoughts on agents? Obviously there's a lot of hype and deserved. I'm a big fan of good hype, not over the top hype. It might be topping out, but there are working examples of people who do it right with the compliance. What's your view of what success looks like? What's the requirements as a CIO and CISO, because there's some stuff that if you get right in the governance and security and the identity, agents are great.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Absolutely. No, no. So I think we have deployed a lot of agents from, like I said, we have this horizontal layer and we are building agents on top of it. The thought process is agent is not just task one to two. You have to be very thoughtful. What is this agent actually going to solve? The five Ws that we talk about. What is this agent? Who's going to use it? Is it going to help with experience? So I think that's been the mentality. But again, right, you have agents on so many platforms. It also creates agent sprawl. So this horizontal layer, it's helping us. And the other thing, what we are trying to do is we are trying to do inventory as much as possible, right?
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> So I am actually bullish on agents personally, but you have to put security as a first thought. You don't want to like, "Oh, I tried out this product, it works, it goes to the final stage and security blocks me."
John Furrier
>> If done right.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> If done right.
John Furrier
>> It's on paper should work.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> Okay. What are some of the things that you see as things that's on your radar and what worries you? I appreciate you're bullish, I am too, but still, you got to sort through, "Okay, now I got to knock these things down and..."
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> What about these other scenarios? What's on your mind and things to do and then what keeps you up at night on the agents?
Shyam Bhojwani
>> I think I'll start with what keeps me up in the night. I think agent sprawl because too many agents, you're hitting your product, SaaS applications, it's going to increase your spend. So that's number one. Information is gold, right? Information is king, as they say. So you want to protect the information the right way, giving right access because with agents you can give over permission and it can actually go in the other direction. So access, permissioning, agent sprawl and we also have to inventory as much as possible because let's be real, people are going to experiment. You can't stop that. But if you do inventory regularly, at least you know what's happening.
John Furrier
>> Inventory of agents.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Inventory of agents.
John Furrier
>> Who's out there and what they're doing.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> That's telemetry observability, right?
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly, exactly. And that gives you the lay of the land, right? Like what tools are being used because agents are talking to your CRM, ERPs, telemetry systems. So it's very important to get that footprint.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. I've really been liking Jensen Huang's narrative over the past couple years, mainly because he's earned it, number one.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> 100%.
John Furrier
>> But he also talks about computer science. He's very techy. And I love when he says computer science and keynote multiple times. Although this past keynote, he didn't say the word computer science once. He did say distributed computing. He used the word tokens 35 times. Not that we're keeping score. It's like a drinking game. But he has a philosophy, which I like, which is the agents will be doing the work. They're the intelligence and he cautions companies to saying, let your agents do their job, but you got to keep the tokens fed to them.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Right. Limited.
John Furrier
>> Now he's in the token business. It's like cellphone people, use your minutes.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> You talk to more people. I get that. What's your thoughts on that? Because now you have a token budget out there. And like I said, the development outcomes could be measured. So in your job, you have staff that are technical. They command good salaries.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> His notion was, "Hey, if you're going to pay the big salary, give them a token budget and say, see what you can do."
Shyam Bhojwani
>> No, no, a 100%. I'm going to share something funny I learned at RSA. I think people are considering token as part of your compensation now, right? Like you get, let's say X dollars as your salary, you will get token as a added bonus or component. So I think this token consumption, token understanding is very serious. I think we all are trying to figure out because token is a finance thing in my opinion, but now it's also becoming an engineering IT thing because it comes from your budget. So I'm thinking about budget for this year. I had to think in terms of tokens. I used to think about like seats, consumption, but now token is a new currency and it's very different because things are changing so quickly. So it's very difficult to forecast. But I think this idea of-
John Furrier
>> It's like giving an artist, "Here, here's a canvas and here's the cheap paint and brushes. No, no, here. Go."
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Go for it.
John Furrier
>> Wait a minute, you didn't use it.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> What's the art? Where's the art?
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> We're in an artisan Renaissance on technology.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> 100%.
John Furrier
>> The craft of engineering is back. So if you say you could do it, paint the picture.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly. You have the tokens. You have the currency.
John Furrier
>> This is actually great because then you get out of the false hires.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> I'm a huge proponent of the token budget. I think it's clever. Now, again, I think there's a little bit of agenda there, sure, like the phone companies.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly. No, but I think the other aspect also is, I always say this, using tokens is one way to show productivity, but you also want to be careful that is thousand lines of code equal to hundred lines of code? Maybe yes, right? Those hundred lines are more effective. So I think it's-
John Furrier
>> It's outcome driven.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> If it's Picasso painting, you don't want to not give the guy paint.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> Give him paint all you want.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> That's where we are. This is why I love this artisan. And that's a direct changeover from the last wave of iterate fast, ship, ship, ship. And then there's no artisan in shipping fast. That was a speed game, iterate, use the cloud as an advantage. That was a mechanism. You still have that.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> But now it's like, okay, with agents, you can get more systematic, more orchestration oriented. You're a DJ, you're a puppet master.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Exactly. You're the action master.
John Furrier
>> You're the maestro. All right. Well, great to have you on. My final question, what's on your agenda now over the year? Obviously lots going on. Velocity. Every three months, new things are happening. How are you dealing with the fire hose of change? Obviously you're in tech, you probably love it, but how are you managing it? What's your focus?
Shyam Bhojwani
>> I think number one thing is we will continue experimenting. So as a service team, I call CIO, CISOs, we are a service team. So we want to give excellent service to our stakeholders. So we are going to keep experimenting, keep learning. The other thing also is IT's job is changing now. We were managing SaaS apps. Now we are managing agents. So I think that's going to be a big shift. So I think we are going to be in the game of managing automations, agents, and efficiency.
John Furrier
>> You're the AR department, agent resources.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Resource department.
John Furrier
>> HR. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.
Shyam Bhojwani
>> Thank you so much.
John Furrier
>> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. It's part of our practitioner series. Changing game is happening and the artistry's coming back. It's an integrated, it's multiple stakeholders. The C-suites seem to be co-designing the future. That is a game changer. It's a inflection point. We're doing our best to keep up with it and share that with you. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier