In this installment of the Rubrik "Resilience for Everything" series, Kavitha Mariappan, chief transformation officer at Rubrik, sits down with host Michael Ortega to discuss the dual reality of Agentic AI: unprecedented innovation and amplified organizational risk. Mariappan shares insights from her work with global CISOs and CIOs, highlighting how enterprises are racing to embrace autonomous agents while grappling with new threat vectors. The conversation unpacks the distinct dangers of unmanaged AI, ranging from unintentional "rogue" optimizations – like an agent inadvertently deleting a database to fulfill a task – to malicious code injections that operate at a speed and scale human teams cannot match.
Mariappan outlines how Rubrik is engineering a control plane for this new era, introducing capabilities like "Agent Rewind" that allow organizations to roll back malicious or erroneous agentic actions to a clean state. She cites recent Rubrik Zero Labs research predicting that 50% of future cyber attacks will be generated by Agentic AI, underscoring the urgent need for a "defense in depth" strategy that prioritizes business resilience and rapid recovery over simple prevention. The discussion concludes with a look at the newly launched AI CXO Council and the importance of community-driven best practices in navigating the next Industrial Revolution.
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Kavitha Mariappan, Rubrik
In this theCUBE exclusive from the Rubrik "Resilience for Everything: Cloud, Identity, AI" interview series, Rubrik CTO and co-founder Arvind Nithrakashyap joins Michael Ortega, director of AI marketing, to unpack 2026 predictions for cyber resilience in an AI-accelerated threat landscape. Nithrakashyap explains how coding agents and deepfakes are lowering the barrier for attackers, making “assume breach” more urgent than ever, pushing organizations to rethink recovery as a core security discipline, not an afterthought.
The conversation also dives into why identity will dominate CISO priorities as agentic AI drives a surge of non-human identities – and how visibility across sprawling identity providers becomes critical to detecting privilege escalation and long-dwell intrusions. Nithrakashyap outlines the governance controls needed to keep agents in check (what they access, what they can do and policy-based enforcement), then connects it all to multicloud realities. As AI workloads chase scarce GPUs, enterprises will need a unified control plane and a single metric that matters most – speed to recovery – to stay operational when things go wrong.
In this installment of the Rubrik "Resilience for Everything" series, Kavitha Mariappan, chief transformation officer at Rubrik, sits down with host Michael Ortega to discuss the dual reality of Agentic AI: unprecedented innovation and amplified organizational risk. Mariappan shares insights from her work with global CISOs and CIOs, highlighting how enterprises are racing to embrace autonomous agents while grappling with new threat vectors. The conversation unpacks the distinct dangers of unmanaged AI, ranging from unintentional "rogue" optimizations – like a...Read more
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What are the current priorities of customers regarding AI deployment and innovation?add
What is Rubrik doing to address the management and governance of AI deployments within organizations?add
>> Hey everyone. Michael Ortega here at re:Invent, over here in the Rubrik nomikai hideout here with Kavitha, our chief transformation officer here at Rubrik. Now, Kavitha, in your role, you sit with executives at the largest companies, CISOs, CIOs, CTOs, helping them on their IT and security transformation initiative so they can go innovate in their business. Want to talk to you here with theCUBE about some of the things that you're seeing through these conversations. So in talking with our customers at Rubrik, what are some of their biggest cyber priorities that you're hearing right now?
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Michael, good to be here, and thank you for doing this interview. At the forefront of most of our customers' and I would say future customer priorities, what they're really focused on is how to securely and safely deploy AI and continue innovating at the same time. Every organization today is focused on embracing agentic AI as a core part of their organizational transformation to drive higher innovation and growth, and to do that, they're, one, leaning in, two, also grappling with what that means, operationally, technically and economically.
Michael Ortega
>> Absolutely. So AI, it's a hot trend, everyone's investing, wants to make the most of it, and that's where people are spending time. But there's a lot of risk involved with that as well. So tell me more about the nature of threat... Obviously, AI, tons of opportunity, but what's the nature of threat you're hearing from some of these executives and what they're concerned with?
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Yeah. Look, agentic, we've talked a lot about this in our other conversations, AI introduces so much potential and opportunity. At the same time, unmanaged and ungoverned, it introduces and amplifies the level of risk within an organization. So whether it is, one, managing and protecting against AI-generated or accelerated threats, or two, safely deploying AI for innovation initiatives, automation and things like that, organizations are having to start to think about what that looks like. What can happen? When we think about agentic AI, we think about automation at scale, we think about speed up at scale, we think about the ability to perform tasks that we've never been able to do before. And what that does is also create a certain level of autonomy within the organization. AI agent has the potential, one, to be autonomous, which is great, which is what we want, but AI agents also don't sleep or rest like we do, and what that means is you're introducing a whole new threat vector or risk vector into the organization. They are polymorphic, and you have the potential, one, to introduce a completely autonomous entity into your organization or your enterprise environment that can misfire, can go rogue, by simply trying to do or perform a task, by optimizing a task. The other thing is, how do you manage that? How do you build guardrails? How do you think about safely and securely deploying AI? And then, the other element of this is, what happens when AI is also used to perpetrate cyber threats? So the veracity, the amplitude or the scale of this is beyond what we have experienced before.
Michael Ortega
>> Absolutely. So agents bring a whole new level of autonomy, as you mentioned, which is great, and people will be more productive, but it's a whole new risk vector. I know we've talked a lot about agents, it's like this blending of these non-deterministic AI models, plus the ability to take action, and that can cause a mistake. We hear about some of the mistakes in the news. Can you tell me a little bit more about what are some of these mistakes that can actually happen, or damage that an agent can cause?
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Yeah. I would maybe characterize them in potentially two buckets. One is unintentional, which is an agent being trained to do what it should do, which is, for example, telling an agent to optimize a database, and its potential task execution could be to delete the database inadvertently because that is how it's optimizing it. The other is actually one that is more consequential, more, I would say, intentional, where an agent performs a malicious task, like a malicious injection of code that can introduce a whole new threat vector, I would say wide-scale damage within the organization.
Michael Ortega
>> Absolutely, yeah. I think it's really interesting with agents, it's unlike just a simple hallucination, where if a chatbot tells you that the capital of Mexico is France, an agent's taking an action, like you mentioned, it could erase an entire database. It's a whole new way to think about risk, with unintended... Not just unintended hallucinations, actual action. And then, of course, the malicious compromise you mentioned. So how is a company like Rubrik helping our customers solve and tackle these problems so they don't end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for some agent that went rogue, so to speak?
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Yeah, which we're starting to see a lot of now. It's the tip of the spear of what the potential with agents would be and what some of the new risk patterns that we're seeing. One of the things Rubrik Zero Labs actually just recently discovered through a study is that 50% of cyber attacks in the future are going to be agentic AI-generated, and that is a huge number. And as I said, we're just at the tip of the spear right now, tip of the iceberg, we're going to see so much more of this. And what is Rubrik doing? Well, one of the things Rubrik is really focused on is ensuring that we're creating the control plane for organizations and enterprises to be able to manage their AI deployments, the agentic deployments within their organization. A key capability that we have introduced, a core capability, would be agent-governed. So the ability to actually create a zero trust environment to be able to govern, create guardrails, around AI agentic deployments. I would say what's even more exciting is Agent Rewind, that gives us and it gives organizations the ability to actually roll back any sort of agentic actions, that would have been inadvertent, unplanned or malicious, to a clean state. That is fairly revolutionary if you think about it. But then again, if you think about it based on Rubrik's core DNA and what we do, it's so logical and it's so much a North Star for us and there's so much work that we're putting into that and to invest.
Michael Ortega
>> Yeah, absolutely. That heritage of recovery and resilience.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Resilience, right.
Michael Ortega
>> Yeah. And Rubrik Agent Cloud really bringing together that governance layer, plus the rewind. I love the rewind capability as well. I heard an analogy, a lot of platforms, there's some level of observability, so they show you the fire, but don't hand you the extinguisher. How do you solve it when that agent misbehaves, you need a way to undo, and I love that rewind capability.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> I think a lot of development in the area, people talk about identification of threats, visibility, but I think what is also going to be really important is how we remediate some of this, remediating some of these actions back to a clean state. Look, I think one of the things we all have to come to terms with is the fact that incidents are going to occur, and we are going to need better detection and prevention technologies, hands down. But at the end of the day, we're coming to a common stay, whether it's operational disruptions, agentic disruptions, security disruptions, these are going to occur multiple times in a day, and what a business needs to care about... At the end of the day, if you're in the business of making T-shirts, you should really worry about making the best T-shirts and driving profitability and not about security and IT, right?
Michael Ortega
>> Absolutely.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> We really want to create an environment where companies, organizations, enterprises, can do their best work, can innovate.
Michael Ortega
>> 100%.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> And we need to create an environment where I think there's a mindset shift, that we should assume breach, assume a disruption, and how do we restore everything back to a clean state, so it's as much of this as a non-incident or a non-disruption to a day-to-day operation.
Michael Ortega
>> Definitely. Better to be prepared when that moment happens. We know inadvertently these moments do happen.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> And understand what's minimally viable for an organization to get back up and running, and that is a huge mindset change, because people don't think about this. We always think about, how do I detect an anomaly, how do I potentially prevent an anomaly, which is great, we need to be there. But when we think about defense in depth, it really is about restoring the business very quickly back to a clean state and maintaining business continuity, and when you have that mindset, I think we really work backwards from, what does a catastrophic incident look like, and what is your minimally viable business or organization? And that is a lot of the work that we do, other than obviously building technology, enabling our customers, is also to partner with a lot of C-suite through this journey, because for many of us and them, it's the first time that we're all going through this at this speed of innovation. So that community that we're creating around the C-suite, the best practice sharing around this AI CXO Council that we just launched here at AWS re:Invent, a lot of this is our work to create a community around knowledge sharing, awareness, best practice sharing, so that as a collective, we move the ball forward together.
Michael Ortega
>> Absolutely, yeah. So it's more than just the technology, right?
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Absolutely.
Michael Ortega
>> It's the community. And then, as a transformation you sitting with our customers and talking through the strategies. So now, the year to come, what should customers expect to see from Rubrik as we look forward?
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Well, I think one of the things you can expect to see is that we're going to be very focused on foundational security innovation and technologies. We are a security and AIOps company, and you can absolutely expect us to be putting our foot on the gas pedal with AI operations innovation. They go hand-in-hand, and much of our innovation enablement... And as I said, it's not just about technology. A significant part of organizational, I would say, speed to move isn't just about technology adoption. It really is about legacy technical debt, it's about inertia and organizational structure. And so, you can expect to see Rubrik address all of the above, technology, help our customers, handhold our customers, with a lot of their initial deployments around security and AIOps, as well as a community for practitioners and the C-suite with best practice sharing and community building.
Michael Ortega
>> Awesome. So helping pave that way with our customers, love it.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Absolutely.
Michael Ortega
>> Maybe to wrap up, one question I always love to ask, what are you most excited about in the year to come? What's you wake up in the morning like, "Yes, this is cool"?
Kavitha Mariappan
>> I was just thinking about this, and I'm going to date myself. So last week would have been 32 years that I joined the workforce as a young engineer, and I would never have thought, 32 years later, I would be sitting here equally or even more excited about the pace of innovation and technology and what... And it sounds cliche, but honestly, AI is definitely going to be and is the next Industrial Revolution. All the goodness that's going to come out of that, obviously the amplification of risk, but I'm so excited about the potential of the technology ahead of us and what this can do for business, make people safer, improve people's lives, and create productivity at a scale that we've never seen before.
Michael Ortega
>> Absolutely.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> I think it's tremendous.
Michael Ortega
>> Yeah. A lot of time is spent on sometimes the fear of AI and risk, which is important to prepare for, but the opportunity for humankind, even in health, as we talked about already, is remarkable.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> Totally. Remote learning, drug discovery, surgeries, all types of things, taking autonomous vehicles to the next level, there's just so much. And I also think about what that does for supporting our back-end technologies. We're starting to see silicon manufacturers really double down on what this looks like. Networking vendors really doubling down on what this looks like, because at the end of the day, this is a reframing of a lot of foundational elements of where we are. So how cool is that?
Michael Ortega
>> Yeah, absolutely. So it's a fun, exciting world out there.
Kavitha Mariappan
>> It is.
Michael Ortega
>> And we're going to go check out the rest of re:Invent to see all the new innovations. So thanks, Kavitha, again for-
