Forcepoint appoints Vincent Merlin as Marketing Chief

Forcepoint has appointed Vincent Merlin as chief marketing officer as the cybersecurity company sharpens its focus on AI data security.

Merlin will report to Chief Executive Officer Ryan Windham and oversee global marketing, including brand, demand generation, product marketing, and analyst relations. He joins from Proofpoint, where he spent a decade in senior marketing roles, most recently as Senior Vice President of Global Growth Marketing.

The appointment brings an experienced marketing executive to Forcepoint as security vendors race to position themselves around the risks created by generative and agentic AI. The company has argued that the spread of AI systems inside businesses is creating new data governance and control challenges for security teams.

Those challenges include visibility into what AI agents can access, how they use information, and what actions they take on behalf of users. Forcepoint is seeking to define AI data security as a distinct area within cybersecurity as enterprises weigh how to deploy AI tools without losing control of sensitive information.

Career Move

Before joining Forcepoint, Merlin worked across worldwide marketing and inside sales at Proofpoint. During that period, Proofpoint scaled from about USD $400 million to more than USD $2.4 billion in annual recurring revenue, according to Forcepoint.

Earlier in his career, he held global and regional marketing leadership roles at AVEVA, Dell EMC, and RSA. He holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and an engineering degree in quantum photonics and optics from Institut d'Optique Graduate School.

Windham linked the appointment to Forcepoint's effort to shape its message around AI governance and data control.

"Trust used to be a posture, and it is becoming a deliverable for the agentic enterprise: every AI interaction with data governed, every decision recorded, every time," said Ryan Windham, Chief Executive Officer of Forcepoint.

"The next decade won't be won by organizations using the most AI. It will be won by those that never lost control of it. Vincent's global go-to-market expertise will help our customers and partners see what command of AI makes possible," he said.

AI Focus

Forcepoint's broader pitch centres on the idea that AI security is increasingly a data security problem, not just a model or application security problem. As companies move from employee use of AI assistants to more autonomous systems that can retrieve information, invoke tools, and carry out tasks, security teams are being pushed to rethink existing controls.

That shift is becoming a key theme across the sector. Vendors are trying to address questions around policy enforcement, data access, and auditability as businesses test AI agents in workflows involving internal documents, customer records, and other sensitive material.

Merlin echoed that view in his remarks on joining the company.

"Every technology worth adopting showed up before anyone knew how to secure it. The web, email, the cloud," said Vincent Merlin, Chief Marketing Officer of Forcepoint.

"Companies moved anyway, and the ones that moved early could because somebody made it survivable. Forcepoint is doing that for AI, giving enterprises the confidence to put their best information to work while staying in control. That's why I'm here," he said.

Forcepoint, based in Austin, Texas, sells data security products across cloud, web, networks, email, endpoints, and AI environments. It says it serves customers and employees in more than 150 countries.

Merlin's arrival gives Forcepoint a senior marketing leader with experience scaling demand for security software as competition intensifies around AI-related products. It also underscores how cybersecurity companies are adjusting executive teams as they try to capture spending tied to enterprise AI adoption.