Employee Spotlight: James Jaconetti, VP of Customer Success

Our team is thrilled to welcome James Jaconetti as Nightfall AI’s VP of Customer Success. James brings over 10 years of experience building and leading global customer success teams across innovative companies like Druva, CloudFlare, and more. Read on to learn more about what brought James to Nightfall, as well as his insights on the challenges customers are facing in the cybersecurity space today. 

You’re coming to Nightfall with experience from Druva and Cloudflare, and have been an Advisor to CoderPad. Tell us about your experience, and how it brought you to Nightfall AI. 

I’ve always looked for transformative technology companies who are helping customers find the best solutions to their business problems. In the last 10 years or so, much of the industry has migrated vast parts of infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud, and so many iconic cloud companies have flourished as a result. We, and our customers, are now at the beginning of an even larger paradigm shift, where AI will rewrite once again how everything is done. Nightfall is at the vanguard of applying AI to a host of enterprise security problems, ranging from data exfiltration prevention to email encryption and beyond, and our future is incredibly bright. I couldn’t be more excited to be here.

You have over a decade of experience building efficient, scalable teams around the globe. What advice do you have for leaders who are looking to do the same?

Trust your team and take it one step at a time. Gaining the experience and confidence to lead a global team doesn’t happen overnight; and it really takes a distributed team effort to operate with success around the world. Hire people who are good enough to do your job and help remove obstacles from their path!

What was it that initially drew you to the cybersecurity space?

With the advent of AI, security is becoming incredibly complex, and involves a layered approach to address any number of threat vectors. But ultimately, helping customers prevent attacks, breaches, and other incidents is extremely rewarding.

Companies will always need help with data security, and they derive incredible value from security solutions, which means there is no shortage of customers and opportunities to prove your worth. Nightfall’s AI detection does what security practitioners don’t have time to do—namely to sift through incredible amounts of data across multiple systems in real time, all the time, with cutting-edge precision and automated remediation.

What emerging cybersecurity threats are customers most concerned about, and what steps do customers need to take to address those threats? 

Malicious actors are now using AI to stage ever more sophisticated attacks, from phishing to prompt injection. If AI is being used in attacks, it’s only logical to use AI in defending against those attacks as well. Nightfall was built with AI at the core, and offers a rich suite of enterprise-grade services via our comprehensive AI-native data leak prevention (DLP) platform.

In your view, what are the biggest challenges facing organizations in terms of building and maintaining a strong culture of security?

It’s human nature to be complacent when there’s a lull in activity. We’re not designed to be at heightened awareness in perpetuity. So we have to implement systems and practices that can help anticipate and cover the gaps. From physical security keys to app-based two-factor authentication, and now to security for AI, a culture of security can reach all employees and systems.

How is the rise of generative AI (like ChatGPT, Bard, PaLM, and Claude) forcing the security industry to evolve?

All businesses must invest in the promise of productivity from this new era of GenAI services in order to stay competitive. At the same time, companies have a vested interest in ensuring their secrets, IP, and customer data doesn’t inadvertently make its way into first-party and third-party LLMs. Nightfall can help all companies quickly and easily ensure that their sensitive data is protected, all without sacrificing productivity or other end-user gains. 

What makes you excited about the future of Nightfall?

Nightfall is laser focused on helping our customers to modernize their approach to DLP, sensitive data protection, and so many other use cases by unlocking the power of AI. We’re currently living in the most transformative period in technology since the commercialization of the internet itself, and Nightfall is poised to become iconic in this next generation of enterprise DLP solutions. I am absolutely thrilled for the chance to help build something special and lasting here at Nightfall AI.