Our Gen AI Success Depends on Quality Data
At Trellix, a cybersecurity leader serving over 40,000 clients worldwide, the integration of generative AI into both internal operations and client-facing solutions has been nothing short of transformative. Michael Alicea, Chief Human Resources Officer at Trellix, shared in an interview with me how the company’s journey with AI underscores a critical truth: the success of generative AI hinges on the quality of the data it learns from.
Internally, Trellix has leveraged generative AI to streamline processes, beginning with simple yet impactful implementations like chatbots. These bots answer employee questions about benefits and holidays, adapting responses based on the employee’s country-specific calendar and employment details. Rather than displacing workers, this shift has freed HR professionals from routine tasks, enabling them to focus on higher-value activities. Alicea pointed out that three individuals from the People Services team have already been promoted into strategic HR business partner roles, a testament to how AI can catalyze career growth rather than inhibit it.
Beyond HR, Trellix uses AI to assist in software development. By automating repetitive coding tasks, AI accelerates the creation of cybersecurity solutions without replacing human developers. Instead, employees are redeployed into roles focused on design and innovation, adding a renewed sense of purpose and pride among staff. As Alicea emphasized, it is the combination of AI and human effort that truly drives results.
Building Trust and Confidence Through Hands-On Learning
Teaching employees to use generative AI effectively has been crucial. Trellix’s approach involves hands-on experimentation paired with rigorous attention to the underlying data. The journey began with refining the data sets that AI systems pull from to ensure that outputs were reliable. Initial efforts produced accurate results about 50% of the time, but through continuous feedback and iteration, accuracy has now climbed to over 90%.
This evolution demonstrates a key insight: success with generative AI is a dynamic process. Employees are encouraged to interact with AI, test its outputs, and critically evaluate results. Importantly, Alicea stressed the necessity of returning to the data regularly to recalibrate and validate the AI’s performance. This ongoing vigilance not only boosts AI’s accuracy but also strengthens employees’ trust and confidence in the technology.
Navigating Ethics, Bias, and the Realities of AI Hallucinations
No conversation about generative AI is complete without addressing its risks, and Trellix approaches these challenges with a level-headed realism grounded in experience. Alicea shared a vivid example from a past role, where an AI hiring tool inadvertently favored candidates from a narrow demographic because of skewed training data. That lesson—that poor data breeds poor outcomes—now informs Trellix’s rigorous commitment to data integrity and bias mitigation.
When it comes to hallucinations, or AI generating false or nonsensical outputs, the strategy is similar: systematic testing and validation. While breakthrough insights sometimes emerge from unexpected connections AI makes, Trellix carefully distinguishes between innovation and error, ensuring that AI recommendations are reliable before they inform critical decisions.
Client Adoption and Future Outlook for Generative AI
Externally, Trellix has encountered a wide spectrum of client readiness for generative AI. In heavily regulated industries like finance and healthcare, clients move cautiously, mindful of the compliance challenges new technologies introduce. Trellix responds by tailoring its deployment strategies to each client’s maturity level, ensuring that AI tools align with both security standards and organizational capabilities.
Interestingly, Alicea noted a growing shift even among the most cautious clients. As the cost savings and efficiency gains of AI become undeniable, resistance is giving way to pragmatic adoption. Particularly in areas like threat detection, where AI can sift through vast volumes of telemetry data faster and more accurately than humans, the case for AI is becoming increasingly compelling.
Trellix’s future with generative AI looks bright and expansive. Internally, the company will continue to deepen AI integration in ways that enhance human capability and improve customer outcomes. Externally, Alicea expects generative AI adoption to become ubiquitous across organizations within three to five years, beginning with straightforward applications like chatbots and evolving into sophisticated, customer-facing solutions.
At the heart of this journey is a philosophy that places data quality front and center. As Alicea emphasized, Trellix is not seeking to use AI simply to cut costs. Instead, the company is using AI to expand its capabilities and deliver even greater value to clients. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, Trellix’s experience offers a vital lesson for all organizational leaders: generative AI’s power is only as strong as the data that fuels it. Those who prioritize data integrity, human-AI collaboration, and ethical vigilance will be the ones who thrive in the next era of digital transformation.
Key Take-Away
Trellix’s experience proves that generative AI’s success depends on the quality of the data it’s trained on. Without clean, accurate, and unbiased data, even the most advanced AI systems will fail to deliver reliable results. Share on XImage credit: Walls.io/pexels
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky was named “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times for helping leaders overcome frustrations with hybrid work and Generative AI. He serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote seven best-selling books, and his two most recent ones are Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams and ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Vietnamese, German, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with 8 years as a lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill and 7 years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.