Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 4)

Amir Husain: There are lots of examples where we found binaries that were not registering on any one of the 60 different anti-virus engines and yet our machine learning anti-virus capability gave them threat rating as high as 80%. As we actually investigated the envelope manually, we discovered that there was an embedded threat, and that it was a mutation. Therefore, a signature-based system was not able to catch it. There’s lots of these examples. Now, we’re also starting to see in the cyber-physical domain where you have large physical systems where both natural problems as well as potential cyber threats can be tracked and discovered before they can cause any damage.

Sramana Mitra: Can we get to the last segment where the question is essentially, what is your view of emerging trends in the industry and open problems?

Amir Husain: I’ll first take a higher-level view above cyber security for a moment. One of the things that’s happening that is very revolutionary right now is Mark Andreessen used to say that software will eat the world. By that, what he meant was that as software and automation is making its way to each industry, the way in which that industry operates and the way in which business is done, and the assets that were looked upon as assets of value are all being digitized. That eats the industry.

People that can keep up with that change become the new dominant players. Others that cannot, fall behind. What I’d like to say now is that AI is eating the software industry. If you look across all categories of software applications whether it’s ERB, CRM, or prognostics, in each one of these areas, we are now finally getting access to mass quantities of data. In each one of these industries, data is becoming plentiful.

When data becomes plentiful, the analysis of that data, the decisioning off of that data, and the understanding of that data requires scalable intelligence. Human experts, while they can certainly play a key role in that process of making the final decision, cannot look at all of the things that need to be looked at. They cannot remember everything that the system has to show them and they cannot map every pattern and every unique element that will show up in that data. Because of that fundamental reality, all categories of software are ripe for a redesign around intelligent algorithms. I’ll give you one short example outside of my domain.

If you think about customer relationship management software, what is it today? It’s basically a glorified contact manager. You have a form. The form shows up. You put in your client’s details. You put in what deal your pursuing. You put in a number and that’s it. Is that really customer relationship management or is that just an address book with a web-based form interface.

You have a little bit of reporting and you have different accounts for different account executives coming in but it’s really quite limited. What would truly be intelligent relationship management with the customer would be software that could do research on the customer on its own, that could uncover needs of that customer by looking at what the executives at that company have said at public interviews, perhaps that could look at how the competition of that customer is doing, that would tell you when to contact that customer, that could build a plan around how you get business from your clients, and how you deliver value to your client. It’s more of your thinking and the cognitive problem solving around dealing with that relationship between vendor and customer.

That’s not what today’s CRM is all about. Today’s CRM is basically about an address book. If you apply AI truly and take the spirit of cognition in machines, each category is ripe for the invention. It’s such an unbelievably interesting time for entrepreneurs because you almost don’t have to do much. You can just look at traditional areas and verticals and you can reimagine that with intelligent software. What would that look like? What would AI-powered CRM look like? What would AI-powered SEM look like? What would AI-powered cyber security look like? That, to me, is super exciting.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition
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