E72: RSA Conference Takeaways – Governing AI Agents and Securing Public Infrastructure

Gov Tech Today hosts Russell Lowery and Jennifer Saha recap this year’s RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, noting the event’s commercial scale and a smaller, dedicated public-sector track. Key takeaways include how “agentic AI” is moving from buzzword to reality, with public agencies urged to treat AI agents like users—requiring identity and access controls, least-privilege permissions, logging, and auditing—within existing governance frameworks such as FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and NIST. They discuss governance as a primary security control, growing attention to critical infrastructure and physical access as cybersecurity issues, and the challenge of tiny local utilities lacking staff and budgets, suggesting collaboration and shared services. The conversation also flags procurement and tool sprawl concerns, and explores what outcome-based security might mean for measuring automation, effectiveness, and ROI in government contracts.   00:00 Welcome to Gov Tech Today 00:15 What is RSA Conference 00:53 San Francisco Cleanup Talk 01:52 Public Sector at RSA 04:42 AI Everywhere at RSA 05:34 Agentic AI as Users 07:42 Governance as Security Control 09:25 Critical Infrastructure Cyber Shift 10:57 Small Districts Big Risk 12:38 Shared Services and Support 14:20 Procurement Must Catch Up 16:31 Outcome Based Security Metrics 18:09 Wrap Up and Next Year