Barninder opens with a principle that sounds simple but cuts through most of the noise around AI adoption in enterprise technology: start with the business problem. Not the product, not the trend, not the board's excitement about a new buzzword. The problem. In a market where a hundred new AI tools appear daily and every vendor claims to be the complete solution, that discipline is what separates CIOs who build durable programs from those who spend years chasing distractions. His security philosophy follows the same logic. Security is not a single solution. It is a layered system, fence, door, lock, camera, interior detection, and the digital version maps directly to that physical model. The tools need to work together and they need to be continuously reassessed because the attack vectors are constantly shifting in ways that a five year contract cannot anticipate.
The insurance industry example he brings is one of the clearest demonstrations in this episode of how AI is solving problems that previous technology simply could not. For a decade, the challenge of hand coding insurance applications into systems produced a partial solution in intelligent OCR that worked only when the form template stayed static. The moment the template changed, the solution broke. AI-powered document intake tools have now made that problem disappear entirely, with configurable accuracy thresholds and optional human review built in. That shift, from a fragile solution to a resilient one, is the model Barninder applies across every technology decision he makes.
The conversation closes with a perspective on people and disruption that is honest about the fear and clear about the path forward. Disruption is real, it has always happened, and it will not stop. The buggy drivers were displaced by railways. The handmade watch market shrank and then became premium. The cycle repeats. What does not change is the advantage held by people who keep learning. Barninder makes this concrete in the most literal way possible, demonstrating that three weeks of resume screening work now takes 45 minutes with the right script and the right tools. But the judgment call at the end, who is the right person for this team, still belongs entirely to him. That is the balance. AI supercharges the human. It does not replace the context that only the human carries.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Matthew Connor on LinkedIn
CyberLynx Website
Fletus Poston III on LinkedIn
3D Systems Corporation Website
This episode is brought to you by CyberLynx.com
CyberL-Y-N-X.com.
CyberLynx is a complete technology solution provider to ensure your business has the most reliable and professional IT service.
The bottom line is we help protect you from cyber attacks, malware attacks, and the dreaded Dark Web.
Our professional support includes managed IT services, IT help desk services, cybersecurity services, data backup and recovery, and VoIP services. Our reputable and experienced team, quick response time, and hassle-free process ensures that clients are 100% satisfied.
To learn more, visit cyberlynx.com, email us at help@cyberlynx.com, or give us a call at 202-996-6600.
Why Fighting AI in the Classroom Is the Wrong Battle with Chris Campbell - Ep 207
Maritime Cybersecurity, AI Governance, and the Threats No One Sees Coming with Amit Basu - Ep 206
Guest: Barninder Khurana,
CIO, Patriot Growth Insurance Services
Matthew Connor: Matthew Connor here, host of the Cyber Business Podcast. Today we're joined by Barninder Khurana, CIO at Patriot Growth Insurance Services. Barninder, welcome to the show.
Barninder Khurana: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Matthew Connor: Thanks for joining us. Before we get too far in, a quick word from our sponsors. Hackers are getting smarter — is your security keeping up? Cyberlynx sells industry-leading, AI-powered cybersecurity solutions that detect threats in real time, so you know about an attack before the damage is done, not after. Learn more at cyberlynx.com. And now back to our show.
Barninder, for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us about Patriot Growth Insurance Services and your role there as CIO?
Barninder Khurana: Sure. Patriot Growth Insurance Services is a full-service national insurance agency. We focus on property and casualty, employee benefits, and personal insurance services. We have about 2,100 employees across 160 locations in 29 states. We're a top-25 insurance agency in the U.S. and growing rapidly.
Matthew Connor: Fantastic. And you're fairly new to the CIO role there?
Barninder Khurana: Yes — I've been here three months.
Matthew Connor: We've had about 200 guests on the podcast, of which I'd say at least 150 to 175 were in CIO or CISO roles, and no two have had the same path to getting there. Can you walk us through your origin story — what got you into tech and how you made it to where you are?
Barninder Khurana: Sure. What got me into tech was a phone call I made to my dad back in 1997. I was in India, and if you don't know how the system works there, you take entrance exams for each college separately and the colleges determine what majors you're admitted into. I called my dad and said, "I got admitted into computer science at one college and civil engineering at another." He said, "Go for computer science." That was it. No spreadsheets, no pros and cons, no GPT searches, no college visits — none of what kids go through today. I went into computer science and never looked back. It was a wonderful decision, even though it was a bit of a happenstance.
Matthew Connor: It's interesting — it was probably an easy call for your dad at the time, because computer science was clearly the wave of the future. But how do you give that same kind of guidance to kids today, when the path isn't as clear?
Barninder Khurana: It's a really good question. I recently did a talk at NYU for juniors and seniors, and this was the question front and center. These are students in the middle of bachelor's programs in computer science and the ground is shifting underneath them. They were looking at me asking, "So what do we do now?"
My answer was this: the underlying skills required to be a true technologist haven't changed and they won't. The path to getting there will just accelerate. You can still learn the languages, still learn to code — you'll just get there faster. You'll turn out code faster, check your code faster. But if you don't know the fundamentals, you're going to stumble. You'll introduce security holes into your code without realizing it, and at some point someone will find them and exploit them.
For everyone else, the main thing is: you have to keep learning. That hasn't changed over the last century. If you stagnate, you won't succeed — that's a fundamental principle. Keep learning, keep moving, and things will become clear. Some paths will fall away and others will rise to the top where your skills meet a real market need.
Matthew Connor: I think that's a great point. The challenge is that things are advancing so quickly that keeping up is genuinely hard — there are so many new products every day. As a CIO, what's your advice to others on how to keep pace with that?
Barninder Khurana: Start with the business needs. If you're not anchored there, technology will always distract you. Every company has people who just want to play with technology — and technologists being technologists, that excitement is understandable. But it doesn't always solve the business problem. The question you have to ask first is: what problem are we trying to solve? Then go find the solution. Don't do it the other way around.
Matthew Connor: I completely agree. And on the security side specifically — we've already seen bad actors leveraging AI in their attacks. It's an arms race. We have to be right 100% of the time; they only have to get lucky once. If we're still relying on traditional security products that don't leverage AI, we're falling behind. They're finding vulnerabilities faster, exploiting faster, social engineering better. So where do you stand on this?
Barninder Khurana: Technology is moving faster every day, and AI has accelerated that acceleration. There are a lot of tools out there that claim to be the be-all end-all solution — and security is simply not a single-solution problem. It's multi-faceted and layered. Think about it the way you think about physical security: you need the fence around the house, a solid door with a lock, the right hardware, cameras inside. Those same concepts translate directly to the digital world. You need full observability into your environment, real-time awareness of what's happening, alerts, and tools that are actively fighting attacks.
Even something as seemingly straightforward as phishing has become far more sophisticated because of AI. Years ago, when one of my banks offered to recognize my voice for authentication, I told my wife not to opt in. At the time it seemed like an odd call — it was convenient, after all. But you were essentially handing the bank a voice password. And now, with just a short audio sample, that voice can be replicated convincingly. If you'd opted in and someone discovered that vulnerability, they could use a cloned voice to access your account. The tools have to serve our purpose — a combination of tools that give us visibility, deter attackers, and let us respond quickly when something does get through. That means some newer tools alongside some proven existing ones.
Matthew Connor: That's exactly right — it's still the layered approach, and the parallels between physical and cyber security are closer than people realize. And phishing is a great example of where the right kind of AI makes a real difference. Traditional filters are playing whack-a-mole — as soon as you plug one hole, attackers find another. They set up a new domain that's technically legitimate, send a real DocuSign link that just points somewhere malicious. A traditional product struggles with that. But a tool like Darktrace can flag that the domain is seven days old and route the email to junk without requiring a human to have programmed that specific rule in advance. That's the kind of intelligence that changes the game. And the business case is clear — the people in accounting and operations aren't security-trained. Their job is to be good at accounting and operations. AI-powered tools support them without requiring them to become security experts. Where do you see this going?
Barninder Khurana: If there's anyone who signed up for a five-year contract with a security tool, I think they're doing themselves a disservice — and honestly, that was true even before AI. Because you simply don't know how the technology landscape will evolve. A lot of these newer tools are founded by people with a great idea to solve a specific problem, but whose long-term plan is an acquisition. What happens to your data when they get bought? Will the contract terms you signed be honored?
That said, you absolutely need to be continuously scanning the market. What are your gaps? Start with the business problem. If the phishing tool you've had for five years isn't training your employees effectively or catching the attacks you're seeing, then yes, you should be looking for something better — and there's no better time to look, because the options are significantly improved.
Here's a concrete example from the insurance space. Ten years ago, I was working on a problem where insurance applications came in and had to be manually keyed into the system. The best solution available at the time was intelligent OCR — which was fine as long as the form template was static. The moment a grid changed, you were back to manual re-coding. Today, that problem has completely disappeared. There are commercial AI tools that you can hand a set of documents to, and they'll extract the relevant information, normalize it, and load it into a database — with your choice of how much human oversight you want in the middle and what accuracy threshold you're comfortable with. A problem that was a major pain point for insurance companies a decade ago no longer exists.
So yes — if the tool you locked into five years ago is no longer cutting it, you should be looking at your entire toolkit and asking whether better solutions exist. Because the attack vectors have multiplied, and the tools to address them have gotten dramatically better.
Matthew Connor: Spot on. And as AI solves more and more of these operational problems, I think what becomes even more important is the human element — the soft skills: leadership, communication, team building. Those are the backbone of any organization and I think they go underappreciated in our industry, where we get excited about shiny new technology. Do you agree?
Barninder Khurana: There's a lot of fear in the market — especially in tech — that AI is going to replace everyone's jobs. The reality is that disruption comes with every major technology shift. That's just the nature of progress. When railway tracks were being laid, buggy drivers were displaced. Now we pay a premium for that horse-drawn carriage experience. When watches started being manufactured at commercial scale, handmade watches became luxury items commanding a serious price. The dust always settles. The cycle repeats.
So yes, the fear is real and we have to acknowledge it. But AI isn't going away. It's going to work its way through every industry, at every level. You can't close your eyes and hope it passes. Your choices are to upskill your people or try to replace them — and the companies that chose the latter have learned that lesson the hard way. You teach people, you enable them to step up, and in doing so you build loyalty and retain the skill sets you need. And the most important thing those people bring is context. Someone has to give AI the right context to work with. Who has that context? The people. So teach them to use AI to accelerate their work rather than fear it.
I'll give you a real example. I'm recruiting for a role right now and needed to go through 137 resumes. A year ago, that would have taken me three weeks — fitting it in between meetings, downloading resumes one by one where the platform wouldn't even let me bulk-export them, making individual assessments on each one. This time around, I wrote a quick script, and 45 minutes later I had all the resumes downloaded, categorized, and first-pass filtered against my criteria. I was already reaching out to my HR team with the five candidates I wanted to meet. Three weeks compressed into under an hour.
But the context still sits with me. What kind of person do I actually want for this role? What energy do they need to bring? Can they lead this team? That's the part AI can't do. The first pass was automated — the human judgment comes next.
Matthew Connor: Exactly. The companies that let people go thinking AI would replace them made a big mistake. AI is a tool that supercharges people. You're now doing three weeks of work in 45 minutes, working 15-hour days, and running circles around the version of yourself from a few years ago. That translates into more output, more value, more growth. And zooming out — this is how the economy expands. The world is wealthier today than it was 200 years ago by an almost incomprehensible margin, and technology is a big part of why. AI is going to accelerate that further. But it comes down to balance — you can let technology control you, or you can sculpt it to serve you. That's as true for AI as it is for your Apple Watch buzzing you every five minutes.
Barninder Khurana: Absolutely. And to your point about the historical comparison — 200 years ago, traveling from here to California meant months on the road and a very real chance of not making it. Now it's a 24-hour trip and people do it routinely. More people travel because it became faster and easier, and more people will use AI because it will become faster and easier. There's a learning curve for everyone, but here's the thing: we're all starting at zero. Everyone on LinkedIn is calling themselves an AI expert right now — even people from the data analytics space who are claiming the title by association. But true AI expertise? We're all at the ground floor together. As long as you're learning and growing, you'll be fine.
Matthew Connor: Truer words have seldom been said. That is a perfect place to wrap up. Barninder, thank you so much for coming on. Before we go, can you tell everyone where they can find out more about you and Patriot Growth Insurance Services?
Barninder Khurana: Sure. For Patriot Growth, you can visit patriotgis.com. And you can find me on LinkedIn.
Matthew Connor: Awesome — super easy. Until next time.
Barninder Khurana: Thank you for having me.