"The CISO Award helped us pursue our goal and our objectives internally"

How has your experience been after winning the award last year?
"Winning this award has definitely been a privilege for me, and I would like to use this opportunity to thank the jury again. I can't say that much has changed personally, but this award is really about the team, the people that I represent and without whom this award would not have been possible." 

"It’s been a fantastic way to recognize their contributions, their hard work over the past years. It's also an award that has received a lot of positive feedback in the organization. So it's great, because it's given even more visibility to my team and their contributions." 

Have things changed in the organization for you and your team?
"It's not necessarily a change. We take all opportunities to make the information security team and the importance of information security more visible to all members of the organization. And so when this award happened, it generated a lot of communications internally; people talked about it. That means we had a new chance to communicate some of the successes we had as a team. It helped us pursue our goal and our objectives internally." 

Did peers you didn't know yet reach out to you?
"I received a lot of congratulations. It was really, really nice. My LinkedIn is always full of requests to connect from peers as well as external vendors. I'm not sure that has changed. It certainly hasn't decreased. There is still a steady volume of requests to participate in panels and talks, so we have to pick and choose. I'm sure the award has had a part in it." 

"We’ve been getting ready for the implementation of agentic technologies at scale. Of course, that means that we're also getting ready from a security perspective." 

There are quite a lot of things happening in the world right now. I imagine that, as a CISO, your plate is getting fuller rather than emptier. How do you deal with that?

"Yeah, my plate is getting fuller, there’s no question about it. We have our hands full. But that’s also because there are a few new interesting developments for my team and me, from a technical perspective and an information security perspective overall. Maybe I can tell you a bit about that?"

Yes, please.
"We talked about this last year; we worked on our genAI security framework, and we’re continuing to polish that. This will be a continuous effort. But as an organization, we've also taken the next step. We've been getting ready for the implementation of agentic technologies at scale. Of course, that means that we're also getting ready from a security perspective."

"There are two things that I find really exciting in this domain. We've been working on what we call ZAP, or the Zalando Agentic Platform, to enable agentic workflows in our environment. Connecting it to the internal systems and enabling it for all stakeholders, including non-technical ones, we needed to ensure that it is safe and secure."

"The first thing we started working on and that we've been fully engaged in, is our agentic identity broker, or AIB. This is a critical piece because it allows users to securely use various agents in a compliant way. We make sure that identity and access rights are matched to the agent and that we have an audit trail. If I use an agent, it records that it's me, and not someone else. So there is always an accountable human behind the use of our agentic platform. We've done a lot of work on it, and we're deploying our MVP in the coming month."

"Our agentic identity broker is a critical piece because it allows users to securely use various agents in a compliant way"

"The second thing that we're working on for the ZAP is security monitoring and detection. We want to ensure you have all this embedded in the platform so it's extremely simple for users, and also very safe."

"That’s the internal part. But it's not the only thing we're doing when it comes to agentic technology. We're also looking at agentic e-commerce. Agents are a new gateway for customers to come to Zalando. For us, it's a real growth opportunity, and if you think about it, it really fits into our strategy, into our ecosystem, because it's about meeting customers where they are. We're already optimizing content on Zalando with generative engine optimization (GEO), which allows content to be referenced by AI systems. When a customer decides to use an AI agent, it really allows our content to be referenced."

"We’re leading the way in Europe in the next generation of AI-driven shopping. We endorsed Google's universal commerce protocol, the UCP, which is a new open-source standard for agentic e-commerce that allows AI agents and merchant systems to work together seamlessly. We're quite proud because we're one of only two organizations in Europe that have endorsed UCP publicly. Our customers will be able to  discover and check out our products in AI mode in Google Search and in Gemini, when available."

"As you can see, we have a lot going on when it comes to agents. We're early adopters, and      security is key. Whatever we do, security remains a priority. "