“AI Has Killed Patch Tuesday; Welcome To Patch Every Day”

CrowdStrike’s Chief Business Officer DANIEL BERNARD on why frontier AI has made vulnerability management the most urgent conversation in cybersecurity today in a chat

- Rohit Chintapali

How has the cybersecurity industry changed since late 2022, when generative AI really entered the picture? What was AI in cybersecurity before that?

If I go back to 2022, AI was buzz. There was a lot of noise and curiosity around it, but it wasn’t clear how it would directly impact cybersecurity. We talked about AI in the hands of adversaries being bad, but for enterprises, AI was more like the next generation of a search engine.

You would ask ChatGPT a question and get a more thorough answer than Google, but if you asked the same question twice, you got two different answers. That was basically it at the time.

Things really changed in the last six months. Version one of AI was web-based chatbots. Version two was when agents started to become real, not just Claude Code, but also Codex and others. Instead of asking a question and getting a Google-like response, you could create an end-to-end workflow and have the agent actually produce something. That’s when things started to get real from a productivity standpoint.

How does this change the cybersecurity demand story?

AI is absolutely a demand driver for cybersecurity. AI in the hands of adversaries is bad because they’re able to attack faster, create better attacks, and now uncover vulnerabilities and turn them into exploits.

From the defender’s perspective, AI also changes which cybersecurity companies are relevant. Some categories will get helped by AI, others will get hurt. It so happens that CrowdStrike and the Falcon platform are firmly on the side of AI being a demand driver, and in fact necessitating more of Falcon in customer environments.