About

Trent Leis (CISSP, CCSP, CPA) is the founder of Salient Security Solutions, where he works as an AI and application security architect. He brings more than 20 years of experience securing IT environments and payment systems for financial institutions, healthcare organizations, retailers, and technology companies. Much of that work was hands-on at the application layer and under formal regulatory regimes — as a PA-QSA he assessed how payment-application vendors built encryption, key management, authentication, and secure development into their software, and as a QSA he evaluated cardholder environments against PCI DSS. He applies that background to a single question: how can an organization adopt AI quickly without taking on risk it cannot defend?

Before founding the firm, Trent led AI adoption at a large healthcare organization, introducing the company to generative AI ahead of its peers through an internal assistant that used retrieval-augmented generation to surface corporate knowledge safely. The tool was adopted across business units and recognized by the CIO. He went on to establish and lead the organization's enterprise AI security and governance program — building its charter, policies, approval workflows, and vendor protections from the ground up — and designed an AI-assisted forms-processing system that recovered more than $10 million in annual revenue that had previously been lost.

That combination of hands-on AI delivery and decades of security, compliance, and audit work in regulated industries shapes how he advises clients. His experience spans the network layer, the application layer, and now AI systems, so he can reason about risk wherever it actually lives. Trent takes a risk-based, client-centric approach that pairs technical depth with business judgment, helping leaders make decisions aligned with their actual risk appetite rather than a generic checklist.

He looks across people, process, and technology rather than at controls in isolation, builds security in by design, and emphasizes resilience and continuous improvement — so the outcome is durable, reduces material exposure, and still leaves room for the business to grow and innovate.