Career profile
Alfredo Hickman
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Kai
- Current role, per sources checked 13 August 2026
- 19 March 2026
Alfredo Hickman is the Chief Information Security Officer of Kai, appointed in March 2026.
Career path
Before joining Kai, Hickman served as CISO at Obsidian Security for about seven and a half years, helping build the company's security organization from its earliest stage into an enterprise-grade program.
Prior to Obsidian, he led security product engineering at Rackspace Managed Security for more than two years, where he helped build a global managed security services business and architected managed detection and response offerings in partnership with AWS, Microsoft, and Google.
Earlier in his career he held roles at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the U.S. Department of Defense, founded the cybersecurity consultancy SystemsSec, and served as an infantry sergeant in the United States Marine Corps.
Hickman brings nearly 20 years of cybersecurity leadership experience spanning the private sector, national security, and military service.
Remit at Kai
At Kai, Hickman oversees the security of the company's systems and data while working to strengthen customer trust as it scales. He is leading development of a security program built for the machine-speed era and operating Kai's agentic AI platform within the company's own environment to help shape and stress-test it.
Public talks and published work
In August 2026, Hickman spoke with Dark Reading's Joan Goodchild at Black Hat USA about how AI is reshaping cybersecurity defense. He argued that cybersecurity has reached an inflection point comparable to the commercialization of the internet or the rise of public cloud. Hickman said vulnerability remediation, not discovery or classification, has long been the operational weak link for security teams, and that AI has compressed defenders' response windows while accelerating exploitation timelines. He described autonomous remediation as a trust conversation requiring rigorous guardrails before organizations can hand AI the controls. "AI is giving defenders an asymmetric advantage — for the first time in a long time, we have the opportunity to take the defense on offense," he said. He also described the CISO role as evolving from a technology function into a whole-of-business risk and trust enablement executive. While at Obsidian Security, Hickman joined the company's Field CTO, Corey Elinburg, to present Lessons from a CISO: How to Take Control Over Your Organization's AI Usage, a resource on governing AI usage across a business.
