NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Rahat Sethi is a Senior Director in Adobe’s Technology GRC organization and a widely respected servant leader whose work has helped redefine how modern enterprises approach governance, risk, compliance, and trust. With more than 15 years of experience spanning cybersecurity, technology risk, compliance, AI governance, and customer trust, Rahat has consistently focused on building scalable governance models that empower teams, enable innovation, and strengthen organizational resilience.

Rahat is the Co-Founder and founding architect of Adobe’s Common Controls Framework (CCF), a pioneering enterprise control framework that transformed how organizations manage compliance and risk at scale. When CCF launched in 2015, it was among the first frameworks globally to unify numerous regulatory and security standards into a single integrated control structure, dramatically reducing complexity while improving consistency and transparency across the enterprise.

Recognizing the broader value to the industry, Rahat helped co-lead the effort to open source CCF in 2019, making it one of the first enterprise compliance frameworks shared openly with the global security community and enabling organizations worldwide to modernize their governance practices.

Building on this foundation, Rahat also served as the founding architect of the CCF Automation Platform, one of the earliest internally developed GRC automation platforms designed to operationalize controls, automate evidence collection, and support continuous audit readiness. This effort positioned Adobe among the first organizations in the industry to both open source a compliance framework and build a scalable in-house automation platform to operationalize it, setting a new benchmark for modern automated governance.

Rahat’s leadership and innovation have been recognized with five CSO Awards (most recently in 2026), one of the industry’s most respected cybersecurity honors. He has also served as a CSO Awards judge, helping recognize and elevate innovation across the global security community.
Beyond Adobe, Rahat actively contributes to shaping the future of governance and responsible technology. He serves on the Board of Advisors for the Institute of Internal Auditors AI Digital Transformation Pillar in San Jose, where he provides thought leadership at the intersection of AI, risk, and enterprise governance. He is also a founder contributor to emerging governance models such as the Agentic AI Unified Controls framework (AIUC-1), advancing responsible oversight for next generation AI systems. Known for his humility and servant leadership philosophy, Rahat believes the most impactful innovation comes from empowering people, sharing knowledge