I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Francis de Souza, COO of Google Cloud, backstage at an event in Los Angeles. Amid the din around us, de Souza, who speaks in the calm, measured manner of a university professor, offered useful advice for companies navigating the AI security moment we’re all living through, noting that “there’ll be a transition period, and then I think we get to this better place.”
He wasn’t speaking about Google at that moment, but it’s clear that even Google is still figuring things out.
De Souza’s core message was one security professionals have been trying to get executives to internalize for years, now made urgent by AI: security can’t be an afterthought. “As companies embark on this AI journey, they need to take a platform approach,” he said. “Security is not something you can bolt on later, and it’s not something you can leave up to employees to do on their own.” He warned specifically about “shadow AI” — employees reaching for consumer tools without organizational oversight — and argued that companies need to demand security, governance, and auditability from their platforms from the start. “There’s no such thing as an AI strategy without a data strategy and a security strategy. They need to go hand in hand.”
Worth noting: he wasn’t pitching Google Cloud alone. When I observed that his advice sounded like a Google advertisement, he pushed back. Google, he said, is committed to a multicloud approach, and he made the case that companies that think they’re operating on a …