SANS Institute Veteran Rob T. Lee Joins Dragos as Chief AI Officer

New executive reports to CEO Robert M. Lee, working with customers, AI industry partners, and the OT security community to use and secure AI in xOT and defend against AI-enabled threats.

HANOVER, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dragos, Inc., the global leader in xOT cybersecurity, today announced that Rob T. Lee has joined the company as its first Chief AI Officer. Rob T. Lee joins from SANS Institute, where he spent more than 25 years developing and teaching courses for security practitioners and most recently led the institute’s AI work. At Dragos, he will focus on helping industrial and critical infrastructure organizations understand and manage the impact of AI on their operations. He reports to Dragos Founder, Chairman, and CEO Robert M. Lee.

Industrial organizations are adopting AI faster than OT-specific guidance is being written. They are deciding what AI touches, how its outputs are checked, and when a person must stay in the loop, often without the OT cybersecurity context those decisions require. At the same time, they must prepare for adversaries that increasingly use AI.

Rob T. Lee will advise customers and their executive leadership as they adopt and secure AI in OT, working alongside Dragos’s customer experience and services teams. He will work with AI industry partners and developers to bring OT expertise to how AI is built and applied in critical infrastructure. He will also lead research and thought leadership on AI in OT for the OT security community, and advise Dragos teams as they expand the company’s own use of AI.

“We’ve seen strong adoption of AI inside Dragos, but the impact of AI on our customers and their operations hasn’t been fully explored, and we have a role and a responsibility to help them work through it,” said Robert M. Lee, CEO and co-founder of Dragos. “Rob T. Lee has spent 25 years at SANS building the courses that shaped how defenders do their jobs, and the last several years doing the same for AI.”

“Everyone assumes operational technology is where AI arrives last. I think it is where it has to be figured out first,” said Rob T. Lee, Chief AI Officer at Dragos. “In an IT network you can let an agent make a mistake and roll it back. That does not work in a water plant. OT forces you to answer the questions the rest of the industry postpones: what is the model allowed to touch, where does it have to show its work, and when does a person need to be in the loop. Asset owners are facing those questions now, and Dragos is where I can help answer them alongside the people who know these environments best.”

Rob T. Lee has spent his career on the operational side of cyber offense and defense. He began as a U.S. Air Force officer and founding member of the service’s first information warfare unit, served with the NSA and CIA, and was Director of Threat Intelligence and Threat Hunting at Mandiant, where he co-authored the first M-Trends report. During more than 25 years at SANS Institute, he led curriculum development, created the original SIFT Workstation, and is widely credited with coining the terms DFIR and CTI. Most recently he served as SANS Chief AI Officer and Chief of Research, where he authored the Secure AI Blueprint and led development of the Critical AI Security Guidelines. In 2026 he co-authored the Cloud Security Alliance’s strategy briefing on AI-driven vulnerability discovery and the [un]prompted 2026 State of AI Cybersecurity report. He has served as a commissioner on the Commission on U.S. Cyber Force Generation, convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and has been a Technical Advisor to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since 2018.

Rob T. Lee and Robert M. Lee will discuss AI in OT and what it means for asset owners and operators in a joint webinar at 1 pm ET on November 23, 2026. Registration is available at https://hub.dragos.com/webinar/ai-in-ot-adoption-security-threat-landscape.

About Dragos

Dragos is the global leader in extended operational technology (xOT) cybersecurity, delivering on its mission to safeguard civilization by protecting critical infrastructure and industrial operations. Built for the full xOT environment, the Dragos Platform delivers asset visibility, exposure management, continuous monitoring, OT vulnerability management, segmentation validation, device protection, software supply chain security, and real-time threat detection. The Dragos Platform is powered by the Dragos Intelligence Fabric with more than a decade of frontline OT threat intelligence and incident response insights. Dragos serves critical sectors including electric, oil and gas, manufacturing, data centers, mining, water, transportation, and ports. Privately held and headquartered in the Washington, DC area, Dragos operates globally across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Visit dragos.com.