KB4-Con 2024: AI Takes Center Stage
Cybersecurity culture can help address AI-enabled threats.
balalahe and Golden Dayz/Shutterstock
KnowBe4 has completely revamped its go-to-market strategy, which represents a big shift in how it has evolved its messaging as an organization, said KnowBe4’s Kirsten Esposito.
“We're still talking about security awareness and phishing because that's still really key, especially for those folks that are signing your purchase orders and all of that,” she said. “But the bigger and greater conversation where we’ve evolved our messaging is more about strengthening the security culture and being able to have those C-level conversations to reduce human risk overall. So that's a lot of what we're talking about. And that's where I think our partners are going to get a lot of value because that's going to help them and enable them to have conversations with their customers as well.”
In addition, KnowBe4 is releasing a new sales playbook during KB4-Con. The new playbook aims to seize the opportunity associated with the urgent need for a strong security culture, Esposito said.
“We're going to help our partners understand the positioning around how every part of the platform fits into their offering,” she said. “What are the core problems we're solving? How do we speak to those core challenges? And then really looking at the joint customer persona so that if they're talking to a C-suite individual versus an IT admin, they know how to have those conversations and what the messaging should be at each level.”
KnowBe4 expects to field a lot of questions about AI from partners and customers, Esposito said.
“AI is going to be weaved into every single conversation we have at KB4-Con,” she said. “KnowBe4 CEO Stu Sjouwerman is going to be talking a lot about it and sharing a lot more on it. [Attendees] are going to hear our road map around AIDA, our native-AI platform, and where we're headed with that. We've got various partner sessions where we're going to be talking about that even more. We’re wanting to be able to open it up to our partner audience to say, 'Hey, where are you seeing AI? What are the impacts of AI that are happening?' So I think we're going to see a ton more on that. We're actually expecting a lot of questions on it. It's something that Stu, our CEO, really talks about every day internally with us as an organization because it's such an important change in where we are today.”
KnowBe4 has added more than 9,000 new customers since last year’s KB4-Con and now has more than 65,000 globally, Esposito said.
“We're also seeing that our customers, our joint customers with our partners, are leveraging our full product suite,” she said. “So it's not just the security awareness training that everybody's ... used to, but the other parts of it, like Security Coach, our product that is all about coaching and helping employees be more aware of their actions, and PhishER Plus, [our phishing defense product], they're really leveraging a lot more on that. We've also added a lot more translations and localization of our platform. So that's been huge, allowing our partners globally to go and have more conversations with their customers about security awareness and how to incorporate it into their organization. So we're really seeing a lot of where partners are taking advantage of all these different growth areas, not just here in North America, but internationally as well.”
Many partners are driving more opportunities after KB4-Con, Esposito said.
“They're coming away enabled and learning so much more about the messaging of what we're driving home around security, culture and human risk,” she said. “And they're leaving excited and wanting to be able to have those conversations with our joint customers to expand on building a strong security culture. A lot of what we look at during KB4-Con is how we help to enable our partners, how we help to make sure that they're getting the most of their time from a product knowledge standpoint, resources internally and who they can leverage on our team … where they're struggling, and then how we actually go and continue to have these conversations and build more."
Esposito said the feedback she receives from partners is consistently that “we tend to be a very good door-opener for them, for expanding into a customer and being able to have conversations around other security products.”
“I love that because I know that we're never going to be maybe the highest-value product that they sell, but they're utilizing us to go have deeper conversations, and utilizing the reporting that we have available and all those different key pieces to have those deeper conversations, which is great,” she said. “We want them to be able to do that because then that allows them to have those conversations around security culture.”
Esposito said the feedback she receives from partners is consistently that “we tend to be a very good door-opener for them, for expanding into a customer and being able to have conversations around other security products.”
“I love that because I know that we're never going to be maybe the highest-value product that they sell, but they're utilizing us to go have deeper conversations, and utilizing the reporting that we have available and all those different key pieces to have those deeper conversations, which is great,” she said. “We want them to be able to do that because then that allows them to have those conversations around security culture.”
KNOWBE4 KB4-CON — KnowBe4’s KB4-Con 2024 this week focuses heavily on artificial intelligence (A) and defending against cybercriminals who are improving their social engineering attacks with AI.
KB4-Con is happening in Orlando, Florida. More than 1,600 partners and customers are attending. KnowBe4 provides the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform.
Kirsten Esposito, KnowBe4’s vice president of global channel sales, said KB4-Con is all about securing the future, both AI and the human layer.
KnowBe4's Kirsten Esposito
“When we look at generative AI, it's really empowering even the most novice cybercriminals right now to dramatically improve the quality of their social engineering attacks,” she said. “When we used to look at language proficiency being a barrier for this, it no longer is. All of this AI is really helping to make these attacks more and more sophisticated. So that's going to be a huge message. And when it comes to partnering and the partner sessions, and how we're going to be engaging with our partners, we're really talking about how we can expand on this conversation to engage our joint customers on the need for building a strong security culture and how it's going to mitigate this risk. So that's going to be a common theme.”
KnowBe4 Highlights AI Platform at KB4-Con 2024
KnowBe4 is highlighting its AI Defense Agents (AIDA), its AI platform that enables long-term culture change and human risk reduction, Esposito said.
“With our partners, they're continuing to see it, they're continuing to hear it from their customers, our joint customers, around these risks and what we need to be doing to mitigate it,” she said. “And at the end of the day, a lot of it is around the human layer. So the more we can have that conversation and have that conversation with the C-level folks at our joint customers, it's going to help us overall to be able to bring down that risk.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from this week’s KB4-Con 2024.
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