On the 35th episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, host Mike Britton talks with Adam Keown, Chief Information Security Officer at Eastman Chemical Company. With over a century of innovation behind it, Eastman is a global specialty materials company whose products span healthcare, textiles, transportation, and consumer packaging. As the CISO, Adam plays a critical role in protecting the operational continuity of a company whose materials power everything from vaccine delivery systems to oxygen masks.
Adam’s background as an FBI agent specializing in cybersecurity and forensics gives him a rare perspective on how to defend against both sophisticated and evolving threats. He spent over a decade responding to incidents and analyzing digital evidence before transitioning to the private sector, where he now focuses on stopping breaches before they happen. At Eastman, Adam’s mission centers on two goals: ensuring uninterrupted business operations and protecting the intellectual property that gives the company a competitive edge.
One of Adam’s standout stories involves leading Eastman through a $1 billion divestiture. Instead of relying solely on vendors or consultants, Adam convened a small, cross-functional team to map out the cyber implications in a whiteboard session. The team built custom frameworks for employee and data separation, turning a complex challenge into a principle-driven playbook that empowered staff to respond to setbacks with clarity and purpose.
Adam also shares the threats he sees rising across the manufacturing sector. He describes how AI-powered multimodal attacks are now hitting enterprises with layered, cross-channel techniques that combine email, phone calls, and social engineering. What once might have been flagged as a phishing email now comes paired with voice spoofing and physical impersonation attempts. In this environment, defenders must move beyond indicators of compromise to focus on attacker behaviors and blast-radius containment. For Adam, that means strengthening identity and access controls, closing visibility gaps in remote locations, and taking a critical eye toward SaaS configuration hygiene.
Education is another area where Adam is rethinking conventional wisdom. Rather than relying on outdated one-size-fits-all training, his team is investing in in-the-moment micro-education and role-specific guidance. Whether it’s a pop-up notification when someone tries to send confidential data externally or bite-sized updates that take less time to read than to archive, Eastman is modernizing employee security awareness for today’s rapid attention economy.
Looking to the future, Adam believes that AI will eventually handle most baseline cybersecurity operations. From vulnerability patching to asset inventory management, AI will help organizations overcome complexity and scale gaps that human teams alone cannot manage. But in the meantime, Adam emphasizes one core principle for new CISOs and seasoned leaders alike: build strong relationships across the business. Because at the end of the day, cybersecurity is as much about people and communication as it is about systems and code.
