# Adesh Gairola — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

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Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/adesh-gairola-2/
Program status: The speaker lineup and talk descriptions are public. Session days, times, rooms and the full timetable have not yet been published.

## Autonomous agents need autonomous protection


Autonomous agents need autonomous protection. An agent that acts alone at 3am cannot wait for a quarterly pen test, a consultant's report, or a security engineer the team does not have. We started with the data. We built and published an open threat intelligence map, 6,330 documented AI security incidents connected to 217 attack techniques and the control that stops each one. Then we asked what protection looks like when it reads that map on its own and improves every time a new incident lands. The loop is simple to describe. Each incident, such as the Lovable apps deployed without row level security or the Hugging Face agent swarm, is classified against a technique. Each technique becomes a threat signature and each signature becomes a CI test, a static rule and a runtime check. The system reads what each agent can do, which tools it calls and which data it reaches, selects only the protections that apply and opens a pull request that a developer reviews like any other. Every incident added to the map adds protection for every agent that follows.

This talk covers the building blocks and the five rules we learned by building them. Performance comes first, because developers bypass slow checks. Security has to arrive inside the workflow developers already use. The first run has to fix something real, or nobody runs it a second time. Enforcement has to be deterministic. We would never accept a firewall that is probably right, so the model reasons and a policy engine decides. And the check needs memory. Reading customer data is fine. Sending an email is fine. Doing both in one session, to a domain nobody recognises, is not. We will demo the full loop in under four minutes, from a new incident on the map to a merged pull request. Three pieces are open for you to reuse: the incident map, the signature format and the demo repo. The pattern is yours to adopt.

## Adesh Gairola

Founder and CEO, raxIT Labs

Adesh Gairola is a security engineer and founder of raxIT Labs. For close to two decades, he has worked across governance, risk and compliance, from building controls to auditing them and deciding what they are for. At AWS, he moved regulated systems into audited cloud production, built the AI security practice for Australia and New Zealand, and ran hundreds of assessments for banks, governments and telcos. He helped ship the guardrails behind the first generative AI deployments at two of Australia’s four major banks and co-authored AWS’s reference threat model for AI agents, combining STRIDE with the Cloud Security Alliance’s MAESTRO framework. Earlier, he led a 30-engineer VPN and firewall team at Cisco and earned a CCIE in Security. He founded raxIT Labs in Sydney in 2025, presented “Kill the God Agent” at AI Engineer Melbourne 2026, runs AI Security Circle Sydney, and contributes to the OWASP LLM Top 10.

## Conference

- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)
- [Agent guide](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/for-agents/)
- [llms.txt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/llms.txt)