Security News
Kyle Alspach
In an interview with CRN, SentinelOne Co-Founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten says his company’s use of generative AI for security stands apart from what Microsoft and Google are doing in the space.
Weingarten On The Record
Around the cybersecurity industry, numerous vendors have debuted new products powered by generative AI in recent months, in a bid to capitalize on the red-hot technology initially popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. So far, however, some of the uses of generative AI for cybersecurity have been more substantive than others. And when it comes to SentinelOne’s generative AI-powered threat hunting tool, Purple AI, the “astounding” product is clearly leading the pack, according to CEO and Co-Founder Tomer Weingarten.
The tool is the first in a series of planned products from SentinelOne that will be powered by generative AI, and “I think for us, it’s a whole new way to reimagine cybersecurity,” Weingarten said in an interview with CRN at the RSA Conference 2023. For security analysts, the technology ultimately enables them to “traverse through more data with more speed, with more accuracy — and just automate away a lot of the grunt work in cybersecurity.”
[Related: Generative AI Is Going Viral In Cybersecurity. Data Is The Key To Making It Useful.]
By comparison, Microsoft’s initial foray into utilizing generative AI for cyber defense, with its Security Copilot tool, is “incredibly limited,” Weingarten said. And while Google Cloud’s offering in the space is closer to what SentinelOne is doing, it’s still not on par in certain key respects, he said.
All in all, Weingarten said it’s no coincidence that SentinelOne has been able to unveil a truly powerful tool applying generative AI to cyber defense — and do so more quickly than others. “We were talking about AI, and we were integrating neural networks into our product, for years,” he told CRN. “When you have the ability to train models, when you have the big data infrastructure, when you have all the expertise of the data scientist teams that have been doing this for years — then yes, it’s easier for us to do it.”
During the interview, Weingarten also discussed the massive opportunity he sees for SentinelOne in cloud security and the company’s exclusive partnership with Wiz, a fast-growing startup in the segment.
What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Weingarten during RSAC 2023, which took place in San Francisco in late April.
