Name: Bryan Palma, CEO, KnowBe4
Uploaded: 2026-05-14T17:30:00.000Z
Duration: 18 min 33 s

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Bryan Palma

CEO

KnowBe4

play_circle_outline KB4-CON Orlando: KnowBe4's 9th Annual Conference — Labs, Demos, Mainstage Presentations, Breakouts & Networking

play_circle_outline After an Email Security Acquisition: Three Pillars—Attack Simulation, O365 Inbound/Outbound Protection, and Agent Risk Management

play_circle_outline 60 Days After Launch: AIDA Agents Automate Agent Risk Management, Prescribe Training, Onboard 1,400 Customers

play_circle_outline KnowBe4 telemetry: 15 years behavioral data, 70,000 customers, 100+ million users powering AI.

17:59

Info

Bryan Palma, CEO, KnowBe4

Bryan Palma

CEO KnowBe4

>> (Music)

Scott Hebner

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KB4-CON, KnowBe4's ninth annual user conference here in Orlando. I'm Scott Hebner, and our theme this week is AI-Powered, Grounded in Trust, the evolution to a digital workforce and how you secure risk in that environment. And I'm thrilled to kick this all off with the CEO of KnowBe4, Bryan Palma. Welcome to the show here.

Bryan Palma

>> Thanks. Thanks for having me, Scott. Really excited to be here.

Scott Hebner

>> That's awesome. I'm sure there's people in the audience today tuning in that maybe this is their first conference.

Bryan Palma

>> Sure. Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> So maybe you need a little bit of an overview of what the conference is all about. It is the ninth annual one you've had.

Bryan Palma

>> You got it.

Scott Hebner

>> I think there's thousands of people here. So why don't you just give us a little bit of background.

Bryan Palma

>> A couple thousand people here. It's our user conference, so it's an opportunity for our customers to come here, connect with other users of the product. We have a pretty big community. We have a lab section where we'll be demoing a lot of our new tech, and then we have some main stage presentations as well as breakouts. So it's a bit of learning, it's a bit of networking, and it's a bit of being part of KnowBe4, which we love.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. And you got a bunch of ecosystem partners here too, right?

Bryan Palma

>> We do. We got a bunch of great partners here. All of our partners, I think over 50 this year. Across the board, we're up about 40% on attendance this year. So excited about that. As you mentioned, we get ready for next year, which will be our 10th KnowBe4 Con.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, it's incredible. Time flies.

Bryan Palma

>> It does quickly. Quickly. My first officially. So last year I was here undercover. I had accepted the job as the CEO, but I hadn't started yet. So I was incognito, which ... it's more fun to be out and with the team.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. So you've been here about a year-

Bryan Palma

>> Yes....

Scott Hebner

>> and you've been busy reframing the company.

Bryan Palma

>> Absolutely.

Scott Hebner

>> And you're evolving from security awareness-

Bryan Palma

>> That's right....

Scott Hebner

>> and human risk management into the world of the hybrid digital workforce.

Bryan Palma

>> That's right.

Scott Hebner

>> Digital labor, how this all works together.

Bryan Palma

>> That's right.

Scott Hebner

>> And so, why don't you talk a little bit about what you have in mind here, where it's heading, the progress you've made in the last year.

Bryan Palma

>> Sure. When we think about KnowBe4, we really think about three pillars. You mentioned the first one, attack simulation and training. That's what we're known for. We've been the market leader for many years around creating security culture. About 18 months ago, we bought an email security business, and we now have inbound/outbound email protection for both email, Microsoft, the O365 Ecosystem, as well as collaboration security, which targets Teams and Slack and other chat-like functions. We protect those as well. So that's our second pillar. And our third pillar, which we just released 60 days ago, is our agent risk management, which looks at what are agents doing out there in the ecosystem in a customer's environment, and helps them get smarter about managing them and security.

Scott Hebner

>> Right. So AIDA, the AI defense agents, that is sort of playing offense and arming the team to make sure everything's secure. And the new offering, which is the agent risk management, is sort of playing defense, making sure that the agents that are actually running all over the organization are secure. Is that a fair way of thinking about?

Bryan Palma

>> That's right. A good way to talk about it. AIDA allows our customers to leverage AI in our platform. So before you have an administrator that does all the work, Scott, they put groups together, they determine who's going to get what phishing, what training. Now that can all be done by an AI agent. And interestingly, we have about 1,400 customers now on the AIDA platform. What we're seeing is that the risk score of the individuals in the company is about four points lower. So what that means is that the AI is better at prescribing the training and outlining the system than a human is. But to your point, that's the offense side of it. And then the defense side of it is agent risk management. What we do there is we help companies get an inventory of what agents are in their environment. Today, at KnowBe4, we have 400 agents working at the company. So we want to make sure that our customers are able to identify those agents, and then we map what processes are they using, what they call MCPs, what are they connecting to? Are they connecting to an email system, a financial system, to make sure that there's transparency back to whoever the users are? And the final step is we help put some policy and guardrails about what the agents can and can't do, and we also keep them up to date with the latest training to make sure they don't become a vulnerability.

Scott Hebner

>> One of the things that really jumped out to me about your whole company is you have 15 years of behavioral data that you've been collecting, for what, 70,000 organizations.

Bryan Palma

>> We have 70,000 customers. We have over a hundred million users. So what that means is the efficacy of what we do and how we do it obviously has been proven out over lots and lots of individuals across every possible industry. We use that telemetry to build our future simulations, training, and also to protect customers across collaboration and agents.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. I think that's so important, because obviously data is the lifeblood of AI and of AI agents. So the fact that you're sitting on all that data and information gives you a foundation to really build off and accelerate, right?

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah, exactly. It's a huge differentiator for us. And for us, we've been involved with AI since 2016. We have patents back to then. We've had 10 agents in market. We have 12 agents in market now, 10 of them have been in market since December of '24. So we're way ahead of this curve, and we have to be as a security company, and we want to make sure that our customers feel confident when they deploy agents, because they're going to need to. There's a lot of efficiency and a lot of really good things that come from agents, but like humans, they can be vulnerabilities if they're not properly trained. KnowBe4's business is making sure that we create assets out of your workforce. That's really what we do.

Scott Hebner

>> So what would be an example that AIDA can do that perhaps others can't, that don't have that massive database of information to feed into.

Bryan Palma

>> So one of the things that AIDA really does the best is customized training. So it's able to really assess and say, "We know who Scott is, because we know how Scott did on his quizzes or tests, we know how Scott did on phishing simulations we sent him. By the way, we know when Scott's in the hotel, he doesn't always use his VPN." So what AIDA will do is look at all that data. It'll also look at your job. It'll say, "Okay, Scott's in finance, so he's got access to more sensitive information than somebody that might be a frontline manager or salesperson." It puts all that together and then the orchestration capability prescribes, for you, the most appropriate learning path going forward. And that's why we're seeing that risk score come down, because it's obviously it's processing capability across thousands of users, and in our case, hundreds of millions of users, is way more sophisticated than a human could do.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. And you can just keep feeding that as time-

Bryan Palma

>> Keep feeding it data and it sees, "Oh, what happens if I got this phishing email right, but this one wrong? What happens if I didn't do well on this test? What happens if I'm in finance versus HR? What happens if I am not someone who'll typically use a VPN or do the things I need to secure my company?"

Scott Hebner

>> So let's talk a little bit more about the agent risk manager. And we just ran an agentic AI futures index, and one of the questions we asked was, as a leader, do you feel you're the last to actually manage a human-owning workforce? 92% said yes. At the same time, only 49% had a high degree of trust in the agents that are going to be running the organization, yet only 29% actually had a trust and governance framework in place. So I think that feeds right into where you guys are heading, and I think it's an exciting development. Because there was one word I would describe the state of enterprise AI right now, it is the word trust.

Bryan Palma

>> That's right.

Scott Hebner

>> It's slowing things down. So just talk a little bit about this new offering that you've been putting out.

Bryan Palma

>> Those are amazing stats, Scott. And I think, to your point, 90%, well into the high 90s, think they'll be the last one to manage only humans. So they all know it, but 29% feel the trust. I mean, that's a huge gap, right? That's a 60 point gap there, which is massive. That's exactly what we're targeting. So if you think about what happened with humans, for a long time, humans were seen as a vulnerability, right? Because they would do things like click on an email or download malware or follow a misdirected link, whatever it may be. Our whole premise was come in and train them not only to not be a vulnerability, but to be an asset, to be able to identify it. So we have our phish button where you can actually click it, and if you identify it, that helps the rest of your team, because we can pull it out of their mailbox before they even see it. So that was kind of what we did for humans and still do, obviously. Agents are no different, right? Agents get out there, they haven't been trained, they don't know. Think about them as almost elementary school students, right? They don't know that there's bad people out there that may misdirect them or want them to download malware. So we're working right now very hard to make sure, one, we can inventory the agents. So that's number one, because I think what we found in a lot of organizations is they don't even know what agents are in their environment. To be honest, when team came back and told me we had 400, I was like, "Holy cow, that happened fast." I'm sure other ... so first is inventory. Second then, is to identify what are those agents doing? What do they have access to? Because what creates trust is transparency, right? If I know what you're doing, Scott, then I'm more able to feel good about it. If I don't know what you're doing, it's a bit riskier. So second is really about mapping what are they doing, what do they have access to? And then third is putting those guardrails in place, so that the human who's managing those agents feels good about leveraging them, and doesn't feel like, "Oh, no, I only have a 30% trust factor right now."

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. When I did some of my homework, I believe you're also, the world of permissions and accountability.

Bryan Palma

>> Yes.

Scott Hebner

>> So when you're saying securing the digital workforce, it's more than just what many people would think of security.

Bryan Palma

>> Absolutely.

Scott Hebner

>> It's accountability and treating them almost as a digital workforce. It's like digital HR, right?

Bryan Palma

>> That's right. And for the foreseeable future, humans are going to be connected to agents, right? Humans are going to be managing them at some level. They're not going to be autonomous, at least in the short term. Who knows in the long term, right? As you said, this stuff's moving fast. So we want to give humans the tools to not only manage the humans in their organization, but manage the agents as well. And we know that's a place that, back to your point, many of the big LLMs, one of the things they're struggling with is trust, and they look to KnowBe4 to be a partner with them. Whether it's the work we do with Microsoft, the work we do with Google, with Anthropic, they look to us, because they know we're a trusted brand, and we're trusted over years on helping folks to protect their enterprises.

Scott Hebner

>> And I want to get into the ecosystem in a second here, but the other thing we found in our agentic AI survey was even though, only 29%, have this kind of framework in place, 73% plan massive investments over the next 18 months. So I'm just curious, if you bring this into like a real conversation with a real customer, you don't have to name them-

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah, of course....

Scott Hebner

>> but I assume, from what you're saying here, you're hearing the same thing about trust. How do these conversations go now with recognizing they have to account for the digital agents that these humans are being partnered with?

Bryan Palma

>> I think you hit on it, right? They're all saying they know it's coming. I think they all think that it's happening faster than they thought it would. I think that's a common conversation that we hear as we sit down with people, they say, "Oh, my gosh, two months ago we didn't have much going on and now we do." I think there's definitely this concept of shadow AI is something that's worrying IT and cybersecurity professionals, because they've seen it before with shadow IT, and they know that the employees can very easily get access to one of these LLMs, and are they putting sensitive company information ... so that's the first place I think that many of our customers want to start is, "I just want an inventory." Once you get an inventory, I think the second conversation when we kind of show them, "Hey, these are all the different systems that the agent has access to," their eyes open up too. "Well, what could happen? I mean, conceptually, if my agent has access to my email box, conceptually you as a bad guy, as a hacker, could get my email box. If you can convince the agent to give it to you, immediately my whole email box is compromised." So I think we're seeing people step through those realization at different points. I think, as you get to the larger enterprises, they're trying to govern it, I think, better. I'm not sure how effective their governance is, back to your point, but they do have governance that they've been rolling out. As it gets to smaller organizations, it's a bit more of the Wild West.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, and you've said several things already that kind of lead me to the ecosystem question I'm going to ask here. And if anything, this is moving at warp speed, as you pointed out.

Bryan Palma

>> Absolutely. Absolutely.

Scott Hebner

>> And not only that, but there's more and more empowerment of departments and actual individuals to build agents, and it's coming even faster. And you have all the models under the covers evolving quickly, and the foundation stuff, all this. So the ecosystem seems to be, it becomes increasingly important.

Bryan Palma

>> Sure.

Scott Hebner

>> Not just the infrastructure, AI infrastructure ecosystem, but your ecosystem in general. So if you just talk a little bit about what you're doing there. You've made a lot of progress over the last year, it seems to me.

Bryan Palma

>> We made a lot of progress. I think when we think about the ecosystem, to your point, we don't know who's going to win, right? It's a leapfrog game, and you know that. If you look at the different models and what happens, every other week somebody leapfrogs somebody else. So at KnowBe4, what we want to really want to make sure is that our customers have the protection they need. So we started, initially, because we work a lot in the Microsoft, we work with a lot of small, medium-sized businesses, many of them run the O365 environment. We started with Copilot. That's where we started, and we've seen good traction there. Now we're in the process of moving to Gemini as well. A lot of public sector, a lot of consumers, a lot of small businesses also use Google, so we're working with Gemini, and then moving to Claude, and then to OpenAI as well. So we'll cover the whole ecosystem. When we think about ultimately our solution for agent risk management, it'll be multifactor, it'll be multi LLM, because that's going to be the way of the world going forward.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, I think you're right. It's going to be a very dynamic environment. In the past it was still dynamic, but not at the rate-

Bryan Palma

>> Not at the rate....

Scott Hebner

>> the speed now. So what you offer is really important.

Bryan Palma

>> Got to be able to cover off. And look, I do think it's important for organizations to be making some governance calls around what they use. They can't be using all of these, right? And if you're chasing whoever's the best, you'd be changing every other month, which isn't a sustainable business strategy. So my advice there is you kind of stick with one or two. You can't be using all these, and it's going to be hard to govern all of them as well.

Scott Hebner

>> Right, right. So this is the ninth conference, next year will be the 10th-

Bryan Palma

>> Yes....

Scott Hebner

>> and the theme this year is AI-Powered, Grounded in Trust, which I love. The trust is so key. So let's think about next year. We're here again. What do you want the audience to understand about where you're heading, and what are we likely to be talking about a year from now?

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> Made great progress, what's going to come next?

Bryan Palma

>> Look, I think the big thing we'll be talking about is this concept of workforce with what you just said, trust. And I think it's going to be more and more clear. We're not going to have to delineate between agents and humans. It's going to be assumed. So by next year at this, everyone's going to know what workforce is. And what I always say is, to your point, it used to be a hundred humans and zero agents. Now, let's say, it's 70 humans and 30 agents. Who knows, next year it could be 80 agents and 20 humans, right? It's going to be moving fast. But what I think is important our customers should understand is we are going to continue to cover the full workforce. Humans are not going away. My 20/80 is probably an over-prediction there. But what we know is there's going to be a lot of humans and businesses working side by side with agents, our job is to protect the whole workforce. So I think next year you'll see us doing more and more around this concept of a full workforce, the integration of agents, and I think we'll all be smarter about them too, and hopefully protecting ourselves better. But I also think, on the downside, having done this for a long time, we're going to hear about a lot of different attacks, because agents increase the attack surface, and you're going to hear about a lot of attacks, unfortunately over the next year, where agents were the vulnerability and caused bad things to happen in companies and organizations.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. That's your concept of a dual threat landscape that's building out.

Bryan Palma

>> Exactly. Yeah, it's bold. It's bold. And the game of cybersecurity has always been a game of cat and mouse, right? The bad guys do something, the good guys adjust. The bad guys do something, the good guys adjust. The good guys do something, the bad guys adjust. So the whole concept of agents being deployed is incredibly important and productive, as we've talked about, but a huge attack surface and you better believe the bad guys are going to be after it.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah.

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah, for sure.

Scott Hebner

>> I'm glad you guys exist.

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah, we're excited to exist and we'll keep at it, obviously, helping our customers secure their workforce.

Scott Hebner

>> All right, Bryan, I guess we got to wrap here. Congratulations on your first year. Congratulations on the great crowd here.

Bryan Palma

>> Thanks. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate you guys coming out and being with us.

Scott Hebner

>> Looking forward to learning more.

Bryan Palma

>> Sounds great. Thanks so much, Scott.

Scott Hebner

>> And for all of you, we'll be back shortly with a lot more from KnowBe4's conference here in Orlando, Florida. Oops. See you soon.

>> (Music)

Bryan Palma, CEO, KnowBe4

>> (Music)

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

>> Thanks. Thanks for having me, Scott. Really excited to be here.

Scott Hebner

>> That's awesome. I'm sure there's people in the audience today tuning in that maybe this is their first conference.

Bryan Palma

>> Sure. Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> So maybe you need a little bit of an overview of what the conference is all about. It is the ninth annual one you've had.

Bryan Palma

>> You got it.

Scott Hebner

>> I think there's thousands of people here. So why don't you just give us a little bit of background.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. And you got a bunch of ecosystem partners here too, right?

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, it's incredible. Time flies.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. So you've been here about a year-

Bryan Palma

>> Yes....

Scott Hebner

>> and you've been busy reframing the company.

Bryan Palma

>> Absolutely.

Scott Hebner

>> And you're evolving from security awareness-

Bryan Palma

>> That's right....

Scott Hebner

>> and human risk management into the world of the hybrid digital workforce.

Bryan Palma

>> That's right.

Scott Hebner

>> Digital labor, how this all works together.

Bryan Palma

>> That's right.

Scott Hebner

>> And so, why don't you talk a little bit about what you have in mind here, where it's heading, the progress you've made in the last year.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> One of the things that really jumped out to me about your whole company is you have 15 years of behavioral data that you've been collecting, for what, 70,000 organizations.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> So what would be an example that AIDA can do that perhaps others can't, that don't have that massive database of information to feed into.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. And you can just keep feeding that as time-

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

>> That's right.

Scott Hebner

>> It's slowing things down. So just talk a little bit about this new offering that you've been putting out.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. When I did some of my homework, I believe you're also, the world of permissions and accountability.

Bryan Palma

>> Yes.

Scott Hebner

>> So when you're saying securing the digital workforce, it's more than just what many people would think of security.

Bryan Palma

>> Absolutely.

Scott Hebner

>> It's accountability and treating them almost as a digital workforce. It's like digital HR, right?

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah, of course....

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, and you've said several things already that kind of lead me to the ecosystem question I'm going to ask here. And if anything, this is moving at warp speed, as you pointed out.

Bryan Palma

>> Absolutely. Absolutely.

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

>> Sure.

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, I think you're right. It's going to be a very dynamic environment. In the past it was still dynamic, but not at the rate-

Bryan Palma

>> Not at the rate....

Scott Hebner

>> the speed now. So what you offer is really important.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Right, right. So this is the ninth conference, next year will be the 10th-

Bryan Palma

>> Yes....

Scott Hebner

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> Made great progress, what's going to come next?

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. That's your concept of a dual threat landscape that's building out.

Bryan Palma

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah.

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah, for sure.

Scott Hebner

>> I'm glad you guys exist.

Bryan Palma

>> Yeah, we're excited to exist and we'll keep at it, obviously, helping our customers secure their workforce.

Scott Hebner

>> All right, Bryan, I guess we got to wrap here. Congratulations on your first year. Congratulations on the great crowd here.

Bryan Palma

>> Thanks. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate you guys coming out and being with us.

Scott Hebner

>> Looking forward to learning more.

Bryan Palma

>> Sounds great. Thanks so much, Scott.

Scott Hebner

>> And for all of you, we'll be back shortly with a lot more from KnowBe4's conference here in Orlando, Florida. Oops. See you soon.

>> (Music)