Avdhesh Kumar Bhardwaj is a Vice President and DevSecOps Engineer at Truist Financial Corporation, USA, with more than 20 years of experience in software engineering, cloud security, DevSecOps transformation, and enterprise automation. He specializes in designing secure software delivery platforms, Zero Trust CI/CD architectures, cloud-native security controls, and AI-driven security solutions.Avdhesh is an active researcher, international speaker, reviewer, and author in the fields of cybersecurity and DevSecOps. His research focuses on Zero Trust software delivery, AI-assisted threat detection, ransomware defense, software supply chain security, and self-healing security architectures. He has authored and presented multiple peer-reviewed research papers at IEEE conferences and serves as a reviewer, session chair, and technical program committee member for various international conferences and journals.He is a member of IEEE, ACM, and ISACA, and holds several industry certifications in security, cloud technologies, and DevOps practices. Avdhesh is currently pursuing doctoral research focused on advancing intelligent security automation and next-generation DevSecOps frameworks.His mission is to help organizations build secure, scalable, and resilient software delivery ecosystems that enable innovation without compromising security.

Title: AI-Driven Zero Trust DevSecOps: Securing Modern Software Delivery Pipelines Abstract: As organizations accelerate software delivery through cloud-native architectures, CI/CD automation, and distributed development teams, traditional security models are struggling to keep pace with emerging threats. Modern software supply chain attacks, credential compromise, and configuration drift require security to be embedded throughout the entire software development lifecycle rather than applied as a final checkpoint. This presentation explores how Zero Trust principles can be integrated into DevSecOps pipelines and enhanced through Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create resilient, adaptive, and continuously verified software delivery systems. The session will demonstrate how AI-powered security controls can improve vulnerability detection, prioritize remediation efforts, identify anomalous developer and pipeline behaviors, and strengthen compliance automation. Attendees will learn practical approaches for implementing Zero Trust CI/CD architectures, including identity-based access controls, artifact integrity verification, policy-as-code enforcement, runtime threat detection, and continuous risk assessment. Real-world examples from enterprise DevSecOps environments will illustrate how organizations can reduce attack surfaces, improve developer productivity, and strengthen security posture without slowing innovation. The presentation concludes with a roadmap for building intelligent, self-defending software delivery pipelines that combine Zero Trust security models with AI-driven decision-making to address the evolving cybersecurity landscape.