Three questions are becoming the responsibility of one person to answer
Are we secure? Are we resilient? Is our AI governed?
Investors will ask these questions before they price the next round. Enterprise customers will ask them before they sign the next deal. Regulators will ask them before anyone is ready to answer. And at some point, usually two quarters later than it should have been, a board asks the question behind these questions: "Who owns all of this?"
Tyson Martin is the executive companies hire when these questions need answers.
You already know what moments like these sound like. You may even be in one of them now.
For directors who want sharper AI oversight without needing to become AI experts. A practical question pack built to help boards pressure-test management’s assumptions, surface hidden risk, and make more defensible decisions.
If you're a CEO, COO, or founder, it sounds like this: your CISO is strong but speaks in controls, not valuation. Your AI adoption sprinted past anything your governance can account for. Enterprise deals are stalling in security review, your S-1 timeline has a diligence workstream nobody owns end-to-end, and every one of these problems reports to a different person.
If you're a board director or audit committee chair, it sounds like this: you're receiving three separate reports, security, business continuity, and now AI, and being asked to attest to oversight of a picture nobody has assembled. Your fiduciary exposure is unified. Your reporting isn't.
If you're running the search, it sounds like this: the spec says "CISO with AI governance experience and board presence," and the pipeline splits into three piles, technical CISOs who've never faced an S-1, AI ethics voices who've never run an incident, and polished advisors who've never held the accountability. The role is new. The résumés aren't.
The title varies, Chief Trust, Security & AI Officer; EVP Security, Resilience & AI Governance; CISO with an expanded mandate. The job is the same: one executive, accountable for whether the company can be trusted, with evidence that survives scrutiny.
Most boards do not find out whether cybersecurity oversight is working until something breaks. This resource helps directors pressure-test reporting, clarify where oversight is weak, and spot the gaps that create expensive surprises.
Tyson Martin has held accountability for these answers in the rooms where it is tested hardest.
Not adjacent to it. Not advising on it. Holding it, with regulators, auditors, acquirers, and public markets watching.
Right now Tyson Martin is the Chief Information Security Officer of MIO Partners, a $26B AUM global investment manager, serving as the security executive of record through its transaction from McKinsey & Company to Neuberger Berman — under simultaneous SEC, FCA, and BaFin oversight, with seller, operating company, and acquirer each requiring independent assurance. Ownership transitions are precisely when trust degrades and precisely when diligence looks hardest. Keeping it intact is the current mandate.
Before that, he repeats this pattern across two decades in high-scrutiny environments:
Public-company crisis rebuild. CISO & CTO of Lumber Liquidators (NYSE: LL), a $1.1B, 420-store retailer restoring stakeholder confidence after a national reputational crisis, where the job wasn't reducing risk; it was making trust demonstrable again, in view of auditors, regulators, investors, and press.
Regulated launch with no precedent. CISO for PokerStars and Resorts Casino during the launch of regulated U.S. online gaming, building trust with regulators in a category whose rules were being written in real time. Every pre-IPO AI company lives this exact tension today.
Customer trust as the product. CISO & CTO of Orvis, architecting payment tokenization across a multi-channel platform (published case study) for a brand whose entire market position rested on customer trust.
The board's-eye view. Four years as an Executive Technology & Cybersecurity Advisor at AWS, guiding boards and C-suites through cloud, cyber, resilience, and AI-readiness decisions — learning how directors actually consume risk, and why most security reporting fails them.
Fortune-30 foundations. Security architecture at The Home Depot, in one of the world's highest-volume payment environments.
NACD Directorship Certified · CISSP · Carnegie Mellon CISO Executive Program · AIGP (in progress)
Trust debt is real debt. Who is managing your trust balance sheet?
Every deferred control, every AI system without an owner, every risk report the board approved without understanding, it compounds like technical debt. But trust debt gets called by regulators, acquirers, and enterprise customers, at the moment of maximum leverage against you: in diligence, after an incident, inside the deal.
Companies that treat trust as a slogan pay that debt at the worst possible price. Companies that treat trust as a measurable, governed, evidenced asset get paid for it, in valuation, in enterprise deals that close, in regulatory relationships that hold, in IPO winds that stay open.
Building that asset is not a compliance function. It's an executive mandate that Tyson Martin takes ownership for.
"Tyson Martin embodies what modern boardrooms need: a leader who brings clarity, credibility, and strategic foresight to every technology conversation. Tyson is what every Board is seeking, someone who understands technology and can interpret and speak to Boards with a message Boards can understand. In doing so, Tyson doesn’t just support governance, he elevates it."
Greg Griffith
Thirty minutes, no charge. Bring your situation — the board pressure, the diligence timeline, the role you're scoping. You'll leave knowing exactly where your oversight stands and whether I'm the executive to own it.
What the National Association of Corporate Directors is saying about Tyson Martin.
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For directors who want sharper AI oversight without needing to become AI experts. A practical question pack built to help boards pressure-test management’s assumptions, surface hidden risk, and make more defensible decisions.
It is as easy as following three simple steps.
Start the conversation
Thirty minutes. Bring your situation, the pressure, the diligence timeline, the role you're scoping. Tyson will tell you plainly whether he is the right fit, and what the role needs even if he is not.
Pressure-test the fit
Tyson will walk your board, committee, or search team through exactly how he would approach the first 90 days, with the same evidence standard he would bring to the seat.
Accountability gets a name
You select one executive who gets you one integrated view of security, resilience, and AI governance, and your board can finally attest to oversight with confidence.
The cost of this seat being empty compounds monthly.
Every quarter that this role stays unfilled, or is split across three people who each own a third of the answer, your trust debt accrues: the AI deployments nobody governed, the diligence findings nobody preempted, the enterprise deals that quietly chose the vendor whose security review went smoothly.
Now picture the other version. Your next audit committee meeting: one page, one owner, every material risk named. Your data room: security posture as an asset, not a discount. Your regulator meetings: a demonstration, not a defense. Your board attesting to cyber and AI oversight, and meaning it.
That's what it looks like when the three questions have one owner and one answer.
A 30-minute call. No charge. You'll leave with a clear read on where your oversight stands and what to do about it.
From assurance to evidence.
When one executive owns the answer to all three questions, the entire organization levels up, and the organization can finally prove it.
Is it secure? → Every risk gets an owner.
No more passing the buck. Every material risk (cyber, vendor, operational) has a named executive owner and an evidence trail. Unowned risk is how trust debt accrues; the ownership map is the first thing I build.
Is it resilient? → The board gets one page.
Fifty slides of technical trivia become a single decision-grade view: exposure, readiness, material risk. The format SEC disclosure rules presume, and directors actually use.
Risk is discussed in business terms with the evidence attached, so every decision is easier to see, easier to fund, and able to survive an auditor, a regulator, or an S-1 diligence team.
Is the AI governed? → Decisions become defensible.
Tyson Martin is the executive public and pre-IPO companies in financial services, AI/data, SaaS, and cloud hire to make trust a measurable asset, one accountable answer to Is it secure? Is it resilient? Is the AI governed?
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