Transcript
I think nobody's got it figured out. That is for sure. I ask every CEO, every CTO, every CISO I talk to, how much productivity are you really getting? Jason Clark joins us now. He is the Chief Strategy Officer at Sierra. Really grateful for a few minutes of your time. Nice to see you. Happy to be here. As you point out, artificial intelligence continues to dominate the conversation here at the ground at RSAC. What are you hearing from customers? And talk to me a bit about the ways that enterprise adoption is still evolving. Look, there's no doubt that AI is the top topic in every single boardroom, every single CEO, and it's happening. They're talking about top-down, like, let's go. There's productivity gains, new business lines, and some people see it as an existential risk to their business. They're talking about it, and it's happening, I'd say, more, it's just, like, people are just, like, grabbing it. I think everybody's becoming a technologist, like, because the true innovation is probably happening inside of, like, the marketing teams and the sales teams and the engineering teams trying to figure it out. But every CISO is in a position of, like, holy crap, this is happening really, really fast. And they're either saying no, like, not happening, and maybe it's still happening just on the slides without them knowing, or B, they're just like, it's just going, and I don't have any visibility to it. How are leaders reframing risk as we move from assistive AI to more agentic systems? So agentic is very scary. It's scaring everybody, but it's amazing at the same time. So people get the value that it can provide, but it really, it's, like, all of a sudden you've got an agent that is logging in as you, and should it be able to do everything you can do? Should it see everything you can see? The answer is always no, but yet you're giving it your logins to each of these applications and all of your data, and 91% of the data that you're giving it access to you've not even looked at ever in your life. So all of a sudden, like, you might have access to how much everybody makes in the company and you don't even know, but your AI now knows, right? And so it's creating, the attack surface is becoming 1,000 times greater. And so this is, like, so the opportunity is rich of what it can do, it can work for you all night, but again, from a security standpoint, it's the biggest, fastest-growing attack surface that's ever been in history. Do you see a reality where companies are still experimenting, or are the stakes now a bit more real, at least at a business level? Look, the stakes are real. Everybody's experimenting. I think nobody's got it figured out. That is for sure. I ask every CEO, every CTO, every CISO I talk to, how much productivity are you really getting? And you'll get, like, there's a couple of engineers that are 10x-ing themselves. They're already the best engineers in the world. And then you've got other people, most people are getting 30% to 50%, and maybe some people give an answer of, hey, some teams are getting 3x. So the opportunity is there, but nobody's really figured it out, because we don't even know what the true agentic platform is going to be. Is it going to be CloudBot? People don't know yet. Every single day, we have a new innovation. Again, this is what, from a security standpoint, it's scaring the crap out of everybody, because they haven't figured out how to secure it. You raised $400 million. Talk to me a bit about the ways you're already deploying that capital. What does that execution look like for you? Yeah. It is, everything's about being, like, look, securing AI starts with data. I talked about this agent that you're giving it access and saying, yeah, go be me, but be me all night long, and be 100 of me. But as you're doing that, you can't create guardrails around it, because I just asked you, like, would you give it everything? It shouldn't see everything you can see. So those guardrails is about data, like, okay, be me, but don't see everything and provide everything that I could do. Don't give the crown jewels away. And so how do you do that? Everything centers on data. That's the real risk. Like, the job, we've never, we renamed this industry to cybersecurity from information security. It really is information security. Somehow it became cybersecurity because it came about the threats, but I think we're remembering all of a sudden it's about data. And so AI is really highlighting, that's why, you know, we're doing so well. And you know, we kind of announced we're the seventh fastest growing company in the history of the world, and a big part of that is everybody's waking up to AI starts with data, I have to know my data, what's going in the models, what's coming out of the models, what agents are doing. And so that's the first initial motion of that, right? So that's all of our money is going into agentic and AI security on what we've already built is this data security platform. Before I let you go, what does getting AI security right actually look like? And how is Sierra helping enterprises actually do it? Starts with first you have to find it. Find all the data with like what is amazing innovation that we had and that nobody else has in the world is AI native leveraging that to understand the context and the intelligence around all your data and doing that using AI versus everybody else did it with regular expression before, and a little bit of machine learning. So find it, find the data, who has access, who did access, what did they do with that access? Are they human? Are they non-human? Are they third parties? Then the next step is find it and fix it. So that was why we bought a DLP company, a very next-gen innovative DLP company to say you've got all these data controls, go over top of all of it, sit as this brain. So we're creating the brain of all your data, all of your risk, and all of your AI. And then the nervous system to orchestrate leveraging all of your muscles. So it's really, I tell people, they have DLP projects, they have DSPM projects, or they have AI projects. I'm like, guys, it's all the same. It's all about data. It's a data security and AI project. And so you have to reframe the thinking to find it, fix it, and then enable it. So the biggest shift is getting CISOs to stop saying no to AI. I'll give one real quick story. I met with a CISO yesterday, she was like, look, my CEO is saying that our company has a massive threat. We're going to be disrupted if we don't quickly adopt AI. But the risks are too great. I can't say yes. And I'm like, your CEO is saying you're going to die. And you're saying no, we're not going to adopt AI. How can you do that? We have to say yes. So my job is to show you that I've got the guardrails built for you to say yes to AI and with some controls. And let's change your conversation. And by the way, how much would your CEO be willing to pay for that? She's like, probably name the number, because he's talking about billions of dollars to gain or lose. And I'm like, that's a pretty big check, unlike the way you've ever thought about security before. It really moves CISOs to not just be CISOs, but to be chief data officers and chief AI officers, if you think about it, because they're the first person using our tech, they're the first person in the company to actually know how much data they have in the company. There's no CISO in the world, if they don't have Sierra, that can answer how much data is in the company and what's its value, how important it is, how it's being used. Wow. Fascinating time to have conversations like this. Congratulations on all the success. And thanks for sitting down with us. Good to see you.
