Name: Eric Foster, TENEX.AI
Uploaded: 2026-08-05T17:00:00.000Z
Duration: 19 min 18 s

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More from Black Hat USA 2026

Eric Foster

CEO

TENEX.AI

play_circle_outline Industry skepticism and AI-washing; need to prove efficacy and build trust

play_circle_outline TENEX.AI: 100% Alert Coverage in Under a Minute for Overwhelmed SOCs

play_circle_outline TENEX Turnkey: deployment guarantee, live in seven days or less

play_circle_outline Hybrid deployment: supplementing or replacing MDR and managed SOCs

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Eric Foster, TENEX.AI

Eric Foster

CEO TENEX.AI

Krista Case

>> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE. We're live here still at Black Hat 2026 here at the Mandalay Bay. And we're having a lot of conversations these days about these frontier AI models and how they're compressing the timeline of cyberattacks. We used to have, days or hours to respond, and now we have minutes or even seconds. So we're seeing that security operations are really having to fight fire with fire and find ways to potentially use AI to react just as quickly. And here at the show at Black Hat, if you walk the floor, there's a deluge of companies talking about autonomous capabilities and how they're better enabling security operations teams to do things like investigate and prioritize attacks. But building that trust, especially with this practitioner base that's very skeptical, rightfully so, is going to take some time. And I have the pleasure of sitting down in this segment with Eric Foster, who's the CEO of TENEX.AI, to talk about this. Eric, thank you so much for joining us.

Eric Foster

>> Thanks for having us. We're so excited to be here.

Krista Case

>> Yeah, I really appreciate you sitting down, especially since TENEX.AI is in a really interesting spot in this conversation.

Eric Foster

>> It's been a big week for us, for sure.

Krista Case

>> I can definitely imagine, Eric. So, you know, tell me about that. I know, I was kind of talking about in the intro there, amongst practitioners, I think there's a recognition that they're going to need to embrace AI at least in some form. But can you talk through some of the— maybe the decisions or the trade-offs that customers are thinking about that you engage with?

Eric Foster

>> For sure. One of the reasons we started the company is we saw very clearly that security operations, the blue side of things, was going to be one of the most impacted areas of cybersecurity by artificial intelligence. It was just absolutely crystal clear that artificial intelligence would be able to bring security outcomes that were better and faster and more cost effectiveto maybe one of the most alert-driven parts of our industry, right? Being in the SOC, quite frankly, has been terrible for most people. This is not a job that a lot of people enjoy. You are toiling at this never-ending onslaught of attacks and alerts. And guess what? Just like you said, the attacks are only getting faster, the attackers are only getting faster. So the dawn of artificial intelligence and the immediate obvious applicability to the blue team side of things was such a game changer for us, and it's why we've been able to accomplish so much in so little time. This meteoric rise of the company in a very short amount of time because it is here, it is real, it is provable, and you can have it now. You can change the tide of your cyber defense. If you will, by the use of artificial intelligence.

Krista Case

>> Yeah, Eric, and you paint a really vivid picture of that tool. It's very tangible. I'm hoping you can make it even more tangible and talk through some of the capabilities that TENEX.AI has, but really what a real investigation that is sort of AI-augmented might look like.

Eric Foster

>> Yeah, it's a great question because exactly as you alluded, you walk the floor of Black Hat, every single vendor is, AI washing all of their products. And with all respect and love to this industry that I've been in now for 34 years, man, there are some great companies out here that are really fighting the fight, that have built some amazing offerings. There are also some not-so-great companies that are flat-out lying to you, and I can tell you that from firsthand experience. There are a lot of companies on the floor here even that are advertising capabilities that really truly don't exist. There are a lot of companies that have struggled to try to adapt AI into existing products or existing services. And this is, I think, one of our single biggest differentiators. It's the— no, look, this is real. It's here. It's available right now. And in fact, we've had customers in production now for over 18 months and Really, truly what it brings to your question, the heart of your question is you can truly today have a scenario where all of your alerts are investigated at a speed and at a quality level that was never before possible. This is maybe the biggest dark secret in our industry is before a year ago, I would say confidently, every SOC on the planet, every managed service provider on the planet was throwing away a lot of alerts. In many cases, as much as 80, 90% never got looked at. There was just too much data, too many attacks. People couldn't keep up. We flipped that game, completely flipped that on its head. The whole idea of a company being the intersection of human and artificial intelligence is 10x, order of magnitude better, faster, cheaper. We've got in production the ability to look at 100% of your alerts all the way to decision with artificial intelligence that we can prove scientifically is better than what a human can do in under a minute.

Krista Case

>> Wow.

Eric Foster

>> So instead of throwing away 80 or 90%, we're looking at all of it. And then because we solved that part of it, we said, why don't we go look at all the raw telemetry too? So now for our customers, we're not just looking at all of their alerts in under a minute, we're looking at all of their logs.

Krista Case

>> Okay.

Eric Foster

>> Essentially all of the signal, and we're surfacing it in a way that we can prove to people, 'cause like you said before, earning that trust, security's a very skeptical industry, and it should be, because when you walk around a floor with some really good people and some, true snake oil salesmen, you've gotta be discerning. You've gotta go like, is this real? Will this actually move the needle on my security program? Will this actually make me safer? Will this actually help me sleep at night? Which is really, you know, what I'm looking for as a CISO. Does this actually make my company more secure? We can and we can prove it to people. But even regardless of us, just to talk generically about the problem space, artificial intelligence, we can show you is the way to accelerate your security and your defense. And it's no longer optional. Just like you say, the attacks are coming faster, the attackers are coming faster. And in fact, we just literally talked about this, you know, a couple of our big releases this week. We just literally detected and defended against the largest cyber attack in history this week with our really great partners at Armadin. And tell you a little bit more about that, but the scope and scale and speed of the AI attackers, it's already here and it is coming for you.

Krista Case

>> It is a frightening picture, but like you say, the fact that we have, the defenders have these AI tools available as well, and Eric, I look at it as sort of one plus one is three is the way that I'm describing it. Okay. Or 10 in TENEX's case,

Eric Foster

>> right? There you go.

Krista Case

>> So I certainly want to hear about this attack that you conducted. But before we get there, please, I wanted to talk through the process of how did you prove to your customers that TENEX is not just another snake oil salesman? What was the pro— and you mentioned, it's— you've been live for 18 months in production with customers. Where did some customers maybe hesitate upfront? Can you talk through that process?

Eric Foster

>> Yeah, that is a really great question. And so look, one of the things I tell people, we have a lot of people ask us how we built this amazing company, this amazing product in such a short amount of time. We were named the fastest growing company in all cybersecurity last year, right? It's a 33-year overnight success story. We're only here because of the team that I've built, the experience that we bring to the table, the fact that we've been doing cyber defense at scale at some of the biggest companies and service providers on the planet. We brought in all that experience. So part of that is that level of trust. it's the humans across the table that you're buying, not just the technology, not just the people behind the company. But this is also, again, our philosophy down to the name of the company. We believe that companies don't need to buy another product. They need outcomes. And those outcomes are best delivered by the hybrid of software, including obviously heavy use of artificial intelligence and people. And so, Palantir is maybe the greatest company that is doing this and taking that model where it's like, no, look, we're going to bring an amazing amount of technology, an amazing amount of artificial intelligence and people to the table, people, process and technology to help you drive these outcomes. So that's one big part of it. It's having the human in the loop, having the human that the customer can trust. And we actually go to the level of having 100% human accountability for all of our decisions, essentially. Humans orchestrate, manage, and control AI agents. So, it's not just the artificial intelligence is off running the world and doing all the things. It's people who are orchestrating the agents. They're checking on the results, they're reviewing the results, they're feeding that quality back in. That's a big part of how you earn that customer trust. Where we've also taken that now, one of the things we released this week is the idea of TENEX Turnkey. And the idea is just like we talked before, you don't have time. You don't have time to not be using artificial intelligence. You don't have time to not look at all your alerts. You also don't have time to take a month or two to change out vendors and onboard. So we've put in place the TENEX guarantee. We can guarantee if you meet the right conditions, you can be live on TENEX, 100% Agentic, looking at all of your alerts in 7 days or less. So a big way we earn that trust, we just go and show it. And that was a big part of that idea was like, look, you're going to hear from everybody that they've got AI, that they've got agentic, that they've got all this. How many of those can be live in your environment in 7 days or less?

Krista Case

>> And I'd like to double-click on that, Eric, and kind of talk through what actually is live in that first week and sort of is there anything that will remain for the customer after that first week? Can you paint a picture for us?

Eric Foster

>> Sure. So I will fully lay out, a lot of it definitely depends on customer maturity. It depends on the customer's environment, everything else. We've taken, when we've had to, customers fully live, full production in the same business day. We've had customers that have called us that they've had a pretty decent level of maturity, but they needed immediate help. And we were able to put the platform in, have it fully operational, looking at all of their alerts, again, 100% alert coverage, for all the alert sensors and sources that they're feeding in today and have that live literally in the same business day, which is a big part of why we could make a 7-day guarantee. we know we can do it in a day. But like any implementation, it depends a lot on the customer maturity. If the customer's environment is already wired up, they've already got the alerts, they've already got the telemetry sources, and we're just stepping in to take on the role of the, you know, review of all of those, very short time. If the customer doesn't have as much maturity and they need help, there's gonna be a long tail. And that's part of, again, what we provide with our services-first outcome here. We're parachuting in forward-deployed engineers that are coming in and revising a customer's detections or pulling in additional log sources or whatever else.

Krista Case

>> So it's the common theme, like you say, and actually we were just discussing this in our opening segment for the conference here, it is about the processes and the people and kind of less about the technology in terms of the outcomes that they're receiving.

Eric Foster

>> I agree with you completely. It's about the synergy of all three of those things, right?

Krista Case

>> Exactly. So it leads me to ask as well, a lot of organizations perhaps already have an MDR or maybe a managed SOC offering. How can you talk through maybe the operational changes in a little bit more detail that they might experience after they deploy TENEX.AI? For example, what can they do after 30 days that maybe they couldn't do before.

Eric Foster

>> No, it's a— I love that. So we're— one of the things we've actually seen now that we can deploy in 7 days or less, we've seen some people just run us in POV in parallel to their existing processes, right? So they can truly see and measure exactly what do we see that's different. And the first thing without question is the speed. 100% of your alerts looked at all the way to decision in less than a minute. And then we bring in the human expertise layer behind it. But the amazing difference there is those humans aren't starting from zero when they open an alert, when they open a case, the AI's done all of the Tier 1, analyst work better than what any Tier 1 analyst can do. It's very much kind of like the Tesla self-driving car analogy. It's like for the use cases that the Tesla can self-drive, you can prove scientifically that it's way better than a human. So we've essentially built the Tesla self-driving car of security operations, but we still believe firmly in the Tesla model, not the Waymo model. You still want a human at the wheel. You still want somebody who's there for that 1%, for that quality level, for whatever else. It's how you earn the customer trust. It's how you deploy. So the customers that put us live, whether it's displacing their existing MDR, whether it's supplementing their in-house team, we have a lot of customers that do that too. They've got a great team. They aren't looking to completely outsource their security. They want us in a hybrid model or where we're taking over entirely for them. We run that continuum. They see the speed, but they also see the quality. And that's ultimately what it's about. It's about the outcomes. So let me give you a concrete example because I'm such a huge fan of these concrete examples. So you probably saw— your readers probably saw, your listeners, you probably saw Chaindrop. That came out yesterday, right? 2 million plus infected packages that came out from yet another supply chain. I wake up, there's another supply chain attack. I wake up, there's another supply chain attack. TENEX, we're pretty sure we were the first people to detect this. 2 minutes, and we can prove all this, we just put it out, I think a couple hours before we're recording this. 2 minutes between that corrupted package attack, you know, the attack or package hitting the wire, we knew about it and our customers were protected against it. Our platform detected it with artificial intelligence 2 minutes in. 11 minutes from the release of that package, we'd informed the maintainers. 11 minutes from one of the largest supply chain attacks to us being able to tell the people that got compromised, this is what happened. That is the kind of speed, quality detection window we're talking about. The attackers are bigger, faster, better than they've ever been. Just like you said earlier, you can't do this in days anymore. You can't do it in weeks. It's got to be minutes. And sadly, literally millions of people compromised from this last supply chain attack. If they'd been TENEX customers, they wouldn't have been. That's a big part of why I do this. It's why I wake up in the morning.

Krista Case

>> And I can see the passion for sure, Eric. So it sounds like it's a combination of, like you say, the speed and the quality and also sort of the accountability as well. You talked earlier that there's still a human accountable at the end of the day. So I guess where in particular, as we look ahead, do you think that that human expertise is going to be especially important over the next maybe 12 to 24 months?

Eric Foster

>> Yeah, it's another great observation. So you've got a lot of AI doomerism out there right now. You know, AI's coming for our jobs and nobody's going to have jobs anymore. Man, I am on the complete other side of this. And in fact, we are hiring at the most aggressive pace of, I think, almost any company in cybersecurity given a per capita approach to this. Because if our people are 10x the output of a traditional person. Why would I not hire as many of them as I can? We can do so much more, so much better, so much faster, but it's not by taking the human out of the loop. The human is such a critical component of all of this in building the knowledge graphs, in the quality assurance loops, in the feedback loops, and truly in the accountability level. there's this famous old quote, that I, I believe it was IBM came up with a long time ago that was a computer cannot be held accountable, so a computer can never make a management decision. Obviously, there are a lot of people that are going like, oh, we can just lay all this out to the AIs. And I don't know, maybe someday there's a whole AI risk compliance legal framework where okay, this AI or the people that steer it are being sued for the outcomes of it. But guess what? We believe in that human accountability, the humans at the wheel. I don't know, a great analogy to me is like an airline. Modern airliner, all tech, could technically fly itself. You or I are not getting behind, we're not boarding a plane that doesn't have a pilot at the front of it. And that's our philosophy for the next several years of cybersecurity. We think the pilot is incredibly important for trust, for verification, for accountability, and ultimately because you make that pilot more efficient, more effective to do this incredible work. So we are so bullish on the productivity boom that we think artificial intelligence is going to bring to our entire industry. I think there are going to be more security jobs, not less, over the next 2 years. I think there are going to be more security practitioners over the next few years, not less, in part because I think there are going to be more companies. There is more software, more things being built because it is possible to do so much more. We're in the early stages of the computer revolution. And artificial intelligence is really truly just the next computer. It's the next computing interface. And the same way, 35 years ago we were doing a lot of this on paper, and it shifted to computers. And what happened? It wasn't, oh, we got rid of a bunch of people that were doing paper. No, we hired more accountants, we hired more bankers, we built more things. I think it's going to be the same thing.

Krista Case

>> Well, Eric, I think that's a great message to leave us on, especially at a conference here that there's so much FUD around AI and its impact. So I want to thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure.

Eric Foster

>> Truly a pleasure.

Krista Case

>> I really appreciate it. And thank you so much to our audience. We will be right back in just a couple minutes with more of our coverage of Black Hat 2026. This is Krista Case, and I'm live at theCUBE.

Eric Foster, TENEX.AI

Krista Case

Eric Foster

>> Thanks for having us. We're so excited to be here.

Krista Case

>> Yeah, I really appreciate you sitting down, especially since TENEX.AI is in a really interesting spot in this conversation.

Eric Foster

>> It's been a big week for us, for sure.

Krista Case

Eric Foster

Krista Case

Eric Foster

Krista Case

>> Wow.

Eric Foster

Krista Case

>> Okay.

Eric Foster

Krista Case

Eric Foster

>> right? There you go.

Krista Case

Eric Foster

Krista Case

Eric Foster

Krista Case

Eric Foster

>> I agree with you completely. It's about the synergy of all three of those things, right?

Krista Case

Eric Foster

Krista Case

Eric Foster

Krista Case

Eric Foster

>> Truly a pleasure.

Krista Case