RSAC Rewind: Agentic AI, Governance Gaps, and Why Financial Teams Must Train for What’s Next

This year’s RSA Conference (RSAC) made one thing clear: the security landscape is evolving faster than ever. Among the most pressing concerns was the rise of agentic AI—autonomous systems capable of making independent decisions and executing tasks with little or no human oversight. While these technologies hold massive potential for automation, personalization, and productivity, they also introduce serious new risks, especially for highly regulated and high-value targets like financial institutions.

Cybersecurity professionals left San Francisco with a reinforced understanding that governance gaps and insider threats are the new front lines of application security. And as AI technologies like large language models (LLMs) become more embedded in banking, trading, and risk management workflows, so too do the threats they bring.

What Agentic AI Means for Security

Unlike traditional AI, which is narrowly scoped and supervised, agentic AI can "decide and do." It reacts, learns, and executes based on environmental inputs, often interacting with APIs, databases, and users autonomously. This flexibility is powerful, but dangerous: agentic systems can be manipulated through prompt injection, poisoned via tainted training data, or exploited through insecure plugin integrations.

Combine these new risks with the already complex software environment of financial institutions, sprawling APIs, third-party vendors, cloud-based services, and the threat surface expands exponentially.

Governance Gaps: The Real AI Threat

One of the key takeaways from RSAC 2025 was that technical threats aren’t the only issue; organizational blind spots are equally dangerous. Many institutions rush to integrate LLMs and agentic AI into customer service bots, fraud detection models, or credit risk engines without clear protocols for access control, output validation, or incident response.

In the absence of robust security training and governance frameworks, these tools can easily become vectors for data leakage, misinformation, or manipulation, either through malicious insiders or external threat actors exploiting poorly secured systems.

How CMD+CTRL Security is Closing the Skills Gap

To meet the moment, organizations need to train their software teams, enabling developers, architects, DevOps, and security engineers to recognize and mitigate the unique threats that come with LLMs and autonomous AI. That’s where CMD+CTRL comes in.

Building on decades of secure coding instruction, CMD+CTRL now offers a growing catalog of AI and LLM-specific courses that tackle today’s most critical vulnerabilities head-on.

Here’s a snapshot of how CMD+CTRL’s platform addresses the top LLM risks identified across the industry:

Why Training Must Come First

As the financial industry embraces AI to streamline operations and enhance customer experiences, it must also invest in empowering its Builders, Operators, and Defenders. CMD+CTRL’s hands-on, role-based platform ensures that every stakeholder in the SDLC, from product managers and developers to DevOps engineers and security analysts, has the knowledge to identify, mitigate, and prevent vulnerabilities introduced by AI-enabled tools.

And with CMD+CTRL’s white-glove onboarding, real-world cyber ranges, and content aligned with standards like OWASP, PCI DSS, NIST, and GDPR, teams don’t just learn theory, they Build Skills That Stick.

Conclusion: Future-Proofing with Security-First AI Training

Agentic AI is not just a technological evolution, it’s a governance revolution. Financial institutions that want to leverage the power of AI without incurring unacceptable risk must start by training their teams for a new reality: autonomous systems that act, react, and potentially fail in complex, often unpredictable ways.

CMD+CTRL offers the structured, hands-on training needed to address this paradigm shift. With AI-specific courses launching throughout 2025, your organization can confidently move forward while being secure and responsible.