Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 5)

Amir Husain: Within our own area of cyber security, one of the things that’s happening at the large-scale level is that cyber security is being weaponized. This is very sad but it’s true. Cyber security is now becoming a weapon of warfare. You’ve seen where digital weaponry was used to rollback the Iranian nuclear program by almost two years. In that two-year period, space was created for a negotiated diplomatic solution to a crisis which, otherwise, would have resulted in a shooting war. God knows how many unknown examples that are not in the public domain exist.

Lately, there has also been an attack on the Ukrainian power grid. At the end of the day, nobody disputes the fact that that was a cyber attack. It brought 200,000 individuals off the power grid. These are large-scale attacks now and this is happening in the real world. The consequences and chances of digital threat resulting in actual physical damage are increasing.

They’re also becoming much more diverse. There’s already 500,000 cars in the US that could be remotely hacked. As they’re going down the highway at 70 miles an hour, you can call them to turn left or right. With self-driving cars, that will be taken to a whole different level. As this burgeoning industrial Internet of Things starts to really displace older technologies and as connected things come online, the whole spectrum of security threats expands drastically.

You now have to look at it not just in the context of a hacker or a small group of criminals, but in the context of national state security. Cyber security is no longer about having your credit card stolen. It’s about the security of entire countries and entire regions. It’s about life and death in the real world. There’s a desperate need in this area for better and smarter technology that can deal with a wider spectrum of threats that can augment human intelligence and can get to the bottom of a lot of these potential attacks that can cause serious damage.

Sramana Mitra: I’m a big believer in AI as well. I’ve done quite a bit of work in the AI domain. Several of my startups were with AI stuff although much earlier than the recent AI hype. I agree with you that applying AI to almost every domain of workflow is going to make a big difference and there are opportunities all over the place. We’ll see how much of that happens in the next five years.

We’re seeing tons and tons of companies cropping up. Some of it is not going to be venture-scale companies because some of these are smaller areas that will require real hard-coded expert system style AI implementation that take specific domain knowledge and solve specific problems.

They may not be billion-dollar problems. If you’re an entrepreneur who’s willing to go after a $20 million problem and solve it, it could have a captive audience in those markets. There is, of course, the bigger opportunity as well, but there are tons of smaller opportunities which I think are very interesting opportunities.

Amir Husain: I completely agree with you. Particularly in the developing world, there are lots of interesting opportunities to apply these algorithms. All these business models essentially demand an aggregation model for logistics, transportation, or delivery of pretty much anything that you can think of, and they are all very viable. If you’re focusing on a geography and you look at it as a smaller problem, the chances of success are higher but the market overall is smaller.

Sramana Mitra: Not just geography. I think the vertical domains have specific workflows. Functional problems within vertical domains have specific workflows and that’s where there’s a ton of opportunity but those are going to be smaller market size opportunities.

Amir Husain: I couldn’t agree with you more. AI is applicable to big opportunities and small ones. The small ones are not going to be the ones that excite venture capitalists but that doesn’t mean that you cannot build a legitimate business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right. It was great talking to you and we’ll follow along what you’re doing.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition
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