Insider Brief
- Forcepoint has appointed Vincent Merlin as chief marketing officer, where he will lead global marketing across brand, demand generation, product marketing and analyst relations.
- Merlin joins Forcepoint from Proofpoint, where he spent 10 years in senior marketing roles, most recently as senior vice president of global growth marketing.
- He will also participate in Forcepoint’s AWARE virtual conference on agentic AI security scheduled for September 16, 2026.
Press release – Global AI data security leader Forcepoint today announced that Vincent Merlin has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer. Reporting to CEO Ryan Windham, Merlin will lead global marketing across brand, demand generation, product marketing and analyst relations as Forcepoint defines the AI data security category, enabling enterprises to keep command of AI while putting their best intelligence to work.
“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 Windham. “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.”
Merlin joins Forcepoint from Proofpoint, where he spent 10 years in senior marketing leadership roles, most recently as Senior Vice President of Global Growth Marketing. His responsibilities spanned the worldwide marketing organization and inside sales, helping build the global growth engine and drive AI-led transformation as the company scaled from approximately $400 million to more than $2.4 billion in annual recurring revenue. He previously held global and regional marketing leadership roles at AVEVA, as well as Dell EMC and RSA. Merlin 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.
“Every technology worth adopting showed up before anyone knew how to secure it. The web, email, the cloud,” said Merlin. “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.”
Merlin will join Forcepoint executives, customers and industry leaders at Forcepoint AWARE: Decoding Agentic AI Security, a free virtual conference on Sept. 16, 2026. Get more information about AI Data Security and register for AWARE from the website.
