theCUBE + NYSE Wired: CMO Leaders | Carolyn Crandall, AirMDR

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Carolyn Crandall

CMO | Cybersecurity Advisor.

AirMDR

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play_circle_outline The Role of AI in Cybersecurity: Integrating, Experimenting, and Securing Big and Small Companies

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Managed Detection Response: AirMDR's AI-Driven Virtual Analyst and High-Priority Threat Triage

play_circle_outline Utilizing AI for productivity and quality

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Carolyn Crandall, AirMDR

Carolyn Crandall

CMO | Cybersecurity Advisor. AirMDR

Carolyn Crandall, chief marketing officer of AirMDR, joins theCUBE discussing AI's transformative potential in marketing and cybersecurity. In this in-depth conversation hosted by John Furrier, Crandall shares her insights on leveraging Artificial Intelligence to enhance marketing strategies, tackle the ongoing challenges in cybersecurity, and why AI is crucial for competitive advantage. The interview is conducted as part of the CMO Leaders Events Summit, featuring key insights from theCUBE's researchers and analysts.

The discussion underscores the i... Read more

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What role can AI play in helping marketers stay competitive and efficient in handling large amounts of data and tasks? add

What are some ways AI is changing the way businesses approach marketing and sales? add

What advice do you have for companies looking to incorporate emerging technologies and vendors into their cybersecurity strategy while balancing the trade-offs and budget constraints? add

What is the unique approach taken by the new company in utilizing AI for threat detection and response, and how does it improve efficiency for analysts? add

What is the potential impact of AI on industries and how can CMOs take advantage of it? add

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Carolyn Crandall, AirMDR

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>> Hello, welcome back to theCube here in Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube. We're here for CMO Leaders Events Summit with theCube and the NYSE Wire community, great community bringing together the conversations that matter for companies trying to get the AI equation right from early stage to full growth coverage to public companies, getting all the action from the leaders. Carolyn Crandall's here, CMO of AirMDR among, as well as other startups. Carolyn, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCube. Appreciate it.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Awesome to be here.

>> So you're involved with AirMDR as well as other startups. You had a company you sold to SentinelOne, your over there. AI conversation is interesting because it's about data and you're in the cyber era, so you know that. Cyber kind of leads the pack, if you will, because cyber security went from below the line to above the line at the board level. Now very strategic as breaches could be extinction event for a company. Now marketing could be an opportunity to kind of have that level. We see that trend. What's your take on the AI opportunity for CMOs more broadly?

Carolyn Crandall

>> Oh, it's massive. I mean, you've got to be embracing AI if you want to stay competitive and stay ahead. And you talked a little bit about cyber security before and cyber security kind of solved the data problem. All this data came about and then automation came about and then you still fundamentally have a people problem and the people problem is what can be solved with AI. And it's the same for marketers in any industry. We have lots of data, lots of tools, lots of resources, but we don't have enough hours in the day to get all of the work done. And it can make you so much smarter, even basic ideation, saying something better, extending it out into other mechanisms. I don't know why any marketer would want to do so many of these touch points manually anymore. So I think every marketer should be dabbling. And the incredible difference right now is the level to enter is so low, a $20 subscription to ChatGPT. It's accessible to everyone, which I love. It's not like you've got to go buy a 60 hundred, thousand dollars license to something. It's there and you can tinker with it. Everyone can.

>> Yeah, and the thing about AI too, that's interesting is that no matter where you are in the cycle of a company from start up to established, it's always the same equation. How do I do more with less? How do I achieve the objective? But the objectives are different in different areas. That's a big part of the conversation. The other thing that brings security back into this too is is that we hear a lot at security conferences that we cover from experts is that people got caught into the mechanisms of the software and the process, the compliance. There's a lot going on in security. And in marketing you're seeing some of that conversation, hey, there's a lot of process. And in security, the theme last year we heard was there's craft to it. So you got process and craft. How do you shape things? How do you use your instincts? So use good judgment, how do you identify, how do you understand context? You bring that to the CMO side, a lot of the same things going on where you've got processes and they can help you, but there's craft to it. What's the message, what's the target? What's the objective? Kind of some blending of concepts there.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah, absolutely. And not only on the messaging and positioning side, but on the processing. One of the biggest frustrations that marketers have is, well, you did this event or spent this money and it didn't work. And well, sometimes it's hard to gauge. Attribution is an incredibly difficult thing because marketers touch a prospect so many times before they buy. And what we lacked was visibility. And no matter how good the tools like Salesforce and HubSpot and even the ABM tools that are out there today is it is still hard to get to the data and process it and calculate it and be able to see so that not only do you have a message that resonates with your ICP, but you're actually hitting the nail on the head. And now with these tools, it helps you process all that information in a way you could never do before. And marketers, their first discipline is generally not math. And so this helps a lot be able to do complete complex complications and processing of data in a way we could never do before. So with our lower budgets, we can do more and be more targeted and get better results.

>> Yeah, it's funny, I see a lot playing around on ChatGPT, I was playing around with this give me a positioning document, that you'd probably pay a firm a lot of money to do.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Lot of money.

>> You throw out some variables in there and it actually lays out, now you got to go in and curate it. But I mean the heavy lifting is done. So okay, so low hanging fruit use cases, some of that work can be done, but then you got to come in and make it work and then deploy it. This is another part of the human in the loop piece.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah, I think if you just take and think about, well, what steps could any marketer take? Like you said, feed... And you can have private and contained environments, but feed it the information. And even if it's just public information, feed it into a project, use that project then to ideate and don't just expect it to write for you. Ask it to ideate. Can you create an outline for me? This is my document. What am I missing? Can I improve it? Can I make it more provocative? And then once you put it, you can say, all right, now shorten it, lengthen it, make it for social, make it for an email and continue to massage it. And you're right, it's not a walkaway and put it in and out comes the gumball. It is a little more complicated, but it makes you so much quicker. And in a lot of cases working with these very early stage startups, it's myself as the team and maybe I have some execution with an agency, but there's not that person to go, hey, can you read this? Give me your thoughts. What do you think? Instead, you can go feed it into ChatGPT and go, well, give me five different titles for this document. Give me what I'm missing. Give me other ideas of how to make it better. Or simply you're like, I know I'm not saying this right? Or the other thing, which sometimes we do too because hasty and we're in a rush. It's like, can you rewrite this so that it doesn't sound negative? Or when you've got something sometimes that you need to say but you want to make sure you soften it a little bit. And it's been wonderful to work with to just make sure you're communicating in the way you want to be.

>> What's great about some of the things is it's opportunities also. If you use the AI wrong, you could actually waste time, but you want to save time. There's a lot of great examples there. As someone who's been a seasoned marketer, CMO, leader, and now working with a lot of startups in fractional and or coming in, you have to... It is not a lot of wiggle room when you're in an early stage startup. It's like you got to get the product market fit or market product fit, however you want to look at it. So you have to kind of land on that beachhead market entry and then do that product marketing work. Is there different CMO playbooks with AI that you see from a different stage standpoint? Now once you get to a certain size, you start getting revenue in, then maybe you're building out more in those scenario... And obviously public companies are a whole nother discuss. We'll get that in a second.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Whole other.

>> Put that on a side. But growth companies are different than startups. What is the opportunity to use AI for CMOs? How should the CMOs thinking, what do you do in that startup phase now? How do you work? What's structural, that's probably obviously thinner organizations, the different stages, the approaches?

Carolyn Crandall

>> So in addition to the positioning and messaging, which is right out of the gate. And it also gives you the ability to create A/B tests. Is this better than that? And then the other piece is we didn't have before the ability to take recordings of a sales call and be able to say, "Well, we said this. The prospect responded with that." So getting the right keywords and phrases to incorporate in. And there is a lot of information you can gather from those calls to test and make sure and then applying it to other tools. If you look at all the money that's spent on search marketing. And there are tools that are out there, but a lot of people can't process all of that information. And so now AI is helping to be able to process that. It's turning our lives upside down with instead of traditional search, you have now AIEO as they are calling it and helping go, okay, now that the whole dynamics have changed, I need to look at my content on my website in a whole different way. And so instead of just looking at things like page ranking, but it's what's your authority, what's your quality of content? Is it working and how do I adjust and pivot? And there's a lot of AI tools that are out there today that are helpful. And then once you move a little further in, you may go, okay, how can our sales reps use this technology? And there is a tremendous amount of time savings with leveraging AI to personalize. You think about how bombarded accounts get with all of these emails that we're flooding them with, that it's got to be a catchy headline, subject line to get them to open it. And then it's got to be compelling to get them to click and convert. And then when you actually get to the website, is that again going to get them to fill out the form and give the information and move forward? In each of those steps along the way there are AI tools that can help give visibility. So one, prepare the email so it's more personalized. Two, create the compelling content and then three, even looking at where people are on your website and processing to understand, what do you need to change? Did you bring them all the way there and then have a non-converting page you sent them to?

>> Take me through the playbook of day in the life. I'm a startup, Carolyn, help me with my marketing. We need a CMO, get some leads for us. Do they jump to leads? Do they jump to sell my baby? Or are founders thinking more about their brand narratives? What do you do? What's the steps? A lot of times we're seeing success with AI in these fractional roles where early stage starts are recognizing I can get more out of smaller team than a big team and building out a mart check stack before they need to. So timing of execution, focused execution, whatever you want to call it, is happening. Take me through what's it like if we were working together on a startup.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah, I don't think I've ever met a CEO that hasn't said, "I need more demand." That is always the first-

>> Can't with that problem.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah, that is always the first thing is, "How do we get more customers?" And there are different places you can start. So first you can do a whole bunch of things, but if nobody recognizes your brand, they may just pass you by and the first place they're going to go is to your website. So is your website in fighting shape and does it do the things that you need it to do? And for a while you are just hand-to-hand combat as a small startup. And it is a lot of the founder led outreach and just making sure that they're equipped with the right presentations and tools and resources to do things. So very, very early on, AI is going to help mostly with the positioning and the messaging because a lot of times these CEOs have really powerful things to say, they just don't know how to say it better. And so as you said, you can spend a lot of money with an agency to go and a lot of time to build it out where using AI you can ideate very quickly and give them different ideas and still help them make it their own. There's lots of ways to make presentations look better with AI and other things too. So it is good to help with the demand gen. Sometimes just even sourcing what's out there, there's a ton of events and things. If you say, hey, I want to know what's out there in the market, what's relevant shows with my ICP, you can do a lot of things in a Google search or an AI search to find out those things. So those are areas that are going to help out people a lot to get started. Brand, there are some pretty cool tools around analyst relations and press and understanding sentiment and coverage and other things. Most of the time the very early stage companies are not going to invest in things like that, but there is kind of a balance of what you can do for demand that also reinforces your brand and doing a little bit without necessarily investing in the big tools, but maybe just getting some visibility to know whether you're getting the coverage and information out that you think you're getting out.

>> You're in the security area. So thought hand-to-hand combat, it's pretty brutal there too. 'Cause cyber is in the middle of all the action, so big companies now are trying to transform kind of where they are and they're in a different place than say a startup. As a marketer for the bigger companies, what do you see happening there? What advice would you have for the bigger companies in terms of how do they bring in the change from the existing environment? We're seeing a lot more integration, less rip and replace or wholesale changes, more basic, okay, let's get some wins under our belt. What's the perspective and best practice that you've seen in the bigger companies?

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah, well I think a lot of bigger companies have tried to go more towards the platform approach, but also, there's trade-offs. And so I think my advice is still look at the emerging technologies and vendors and have a certain amount carved out for experimentation because sometimes it's not that one piece that's going to do 80% of your coverage, but it's going to close that five or 10 or 20% gap that you have there. And so continuing to make sure that you continue to carve out a certain amount of experimentation budget. And if you're going to a big event like RSA or something like that, walk the edges, go see or look at the innovation or AI centers or the startup centers and see what's out there because there is a balance. And now with the APIs it's a lot easier to integrate things than it was before. So it's not as much of a heavy lift. And so I think looking at that and then the dynamics of AI, it has gotten so good, the phishing emails and the scams that are going on today that sometimes you're going to need a different type of technology in your stack to be able to combat these threats. And the attack surface has changed, right? It's not just your network. You've got your network, your cloud, your OT, your IoT or all these different types of devices and how well do they communicate with each other. And for the poor, small, medium businesses, they don't have the infrastructure. And so I think the way of the future is we've got to go back to what's core versus context. And that's the premise that I loved about AirMDR was that, look, it's getting too complicated for most small to medium enterprises. So buy a service and let them give you the AI-powered detection. Let them give you the AI-powered incident response. Let them make sure that you're truly triaging all of your cases and not leaving things open. Because I've heard too many horror stories about people even with insurance, cyber insurance, did they pay you out? No, they found a loophole not to pay. So why take all that stress, let you focus on your business and let other people focus on what they do best, which is cybersecurity. So I do think that whole managed detection response arena leveraged by AI is going to be a big win for small to medium businesses.

>> That's a great point. I heard also horror stories around insurance around they don't really value the different data differently. So I've heard that story. So there's a lot, again, back to where AI can help. If you look at AirMDR, what is their focus right now? Can you share a little bit about the company, the size, how they're thinking about it and what are they doing? I mean I love starts because they're naturally constrained. That's why we saw DeepSeek so successfully, they're constrained with GPUs, so they innovate. So what are you guys doing that's innovative? Can you share a little bit about the company and some of the things you guys are doing?

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah, company's a very new company kind of founded on the ground. It's an AI native. So unlike traditional MDRs where they have a service and a structure mostly built on humans, this starts with an AI virtual analyst first approach. It's stop by humans, I mean think about it like autonomous driving cars, right? We're not supposed to take our hands off the steering wheel, but it could do a lot of it for you. So with this the AI is doing... Right now, it can get 90% of the detections fully triaged with better documentation than most analysts and under five minutes. So if you take all that false positive and if you say it even takes 30 minutes for a typical analyst to process a full case and you can do 90% of your alerts under five minutes, you think about now the freedom for the analyst to focus on the ones that really matter and find that needle in a haystack. So the belief is this is not just an enterprise play, the small guys need it too. So there's lots of big companies out there and they're all fighting for the Fortune 2000. And the difference with their MDRs is that it's taking enterprise class security to the underdogs, to the small to medium businesses at a price point that's half of traditional MDR because of the efficiency they can get there.

>> They get the best of the big budget platforms at the price point with all the effectiveness, they get the backstop and they have the needle in the haystack. By the way, if they don't have the backstop, it's the needle in a stack of needles, as you always say in the big data world. As you look at the execution, obviously startups are great 'cause again, they live to fight another day every day. And they got to get that next round of funding, that's based upon sales and momentum or some subjective criteria that they know that they need to hurdle over. That's like sales. You have to get the objective. So the CMO's role is to get sales and keep the customers. So what do you guys do to optimize on that?

Carolyn Crandall

>> Right. Well, if you talk to Kumar, who is the CEO, he's serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Sumo Logic and Logic Hub that bought by Devo and he was early with ArcSight. So he's seen this a lot of times and he'll go, "Raising seed money is not hard." He says, "Raising series A and beyond gets hard because first people will go, "Hey, that sounds a really good concept," but then you've got to prove you can get early customers paying and then you've got to prove you can scale." And so it is constant refinement to go beyond just founder friends that may try the initial first five or 10 installation-

>> Friendlies, we call them.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Right, friendlies. And get to people that see the value and you can prove the ROI to them of that investment and keep them coming back. So getting people to open their wallets early is very hard. And then of course you have a customer base that then you have to maintain and scale at the same time while you're raising that money. You see some companies lean in too fast and spend too fast. And then timing it right to when do you go from just founder selling to hiring your first salespeople and growing, when do you start to invest in beyond the basic of very simple demand generation into bigger, and when do you add a Gartner subscription or do you not add a Gartner subscription? And there's all these other factors that start to come into play of what do you need to do next to project the image and get the endorsement of others outside of your company that you are a viable option for these companies to do business.

>> So thought leadership's huge for you.

Carolyn Crandall

>> It becomes very, very big and it's gotten a lot tougher, right? 10 years ago we could go out and we could write articles and we could pitch the press and they felt so much pressure too, that you've got to have something really compelling and interesting. And I love the pressure that puts on these CEOs that says a cool technology is not enough. It's got to be compelling and add enough value that they want to go down that path and that they also don't believe that one of the big platform players is going to fulfill that need in six months to a year in a good enough way.

>> And you got to get that scale. I love Kumar's vision because we're seeing a lot in the market today. There's a lot of even market hallucinations I call it, that's my word, but I made it up because I didn't make it up, but I co-opted the hallucinations. Because a lot of companies I see that are in the early stage wave their hands, look at us, we got a million dollars in ARR, but they're like one-year contracts because JP Morgan will just buy. So getting customers early on is somewhat easy, friendlies and also experimentation budgets you mentioned. How do you get the next wave, which is deeper penetration, repeat usage, frictionless... Okay, we've got some clients. Repeatability becomes a big deal. Again, this is where the bigger budgets would throw money at it. AI could come in and help, okay, one year contract. Okay, where are we with the account? These are things that people talk about.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah, absolutely. And it does change. I always look at marketing as the nucleus of the company. We're getting everybody to pull on the rope together because whether it's from the initial lead you pull in to the meeting that gets set up to the trial that you do with them or the proof of value that you do with them, these things all tie together. But when their customers, that onboarding process starts to matter too. Because if one year from now, if they have not used the product to its full capability or full value for them, they're not going to renew. And so setting up the right structure in the organization that makes sure that the customer is onboarded successfully because if they never deploy, which how much software is out there? Too much. If they never deploy, they're not going to see the value. And if they use it and they don't see it trigger or add value or catch something or stop something or do something interesting, they're going to say, "Hey, I can live without this." And so continuing to educate the customer throughout of all the different ways to make yourself stickier is really important. And so I think that's one of the differences too, is too many companies kept running after the next customer and forgetting about that retention and every...

>> Sometimes delivery too, got to install, got to use it, got to consume it.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Right. You got to do all those things and make sure that they stay happy. So I think the other change that's happened is companies have started to focus more on that customer retention too and that renewal and what needs to happen. So that is secured going forward. We all get budget cuts, right? It's just how do you make sure you're not the one that gets cut out of that budget?

>> Yeah, that's awesome. Carolyn, great to have you on. Final question for you. As you've seen many ways of innovation, we've seen pre-AI, and again, I love this born in the AI cloud or born in AI because cloud brought in all these new brands like Dropbox, Airbnb, born in the cloud, they didn't need to provision data centers back in the day. Perpetual license goes away to SaaS subscriptions. AI is usage based, so a whole another paradigms here. What are you most excited about as someone who's lived in the job, advises companies, is involved in helping companies get that next round of funding? What are you most excited about with AI right now for CMOs?

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah. I mean it's honestly the productivity and the quality that you can get by using AI that makes it different. And you're right, I've looked since early days of the sneaker net where networking first became a thing back to our early switching and matters and hubs.

>> Just drive over and upload it.

Carolyn Crandall

>> No more floppy drives.

>> We actually do that. Sometimes if you lost a line of feed, upload it.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Yeah. But you look at the change and the efficiency that has come out of things, and you look at even these smaller companies that have disrupted the industry. And I was talking to Kumar about this the other day. Look at Airbnb, what it did to hotels. Look at what the electric car with Tesla did to the automotive industry. You look at these companies that were startups that approach things very differently. And I do think that AI is a massive market disruptor. And as CMOs, we should harness it and figure out how do we leverage it as much as possible. And it is experimentation. And I will tell you the tools I used a year ago are not necessarily the tools that I use today. So constantly ping your peers, ask the questions, try new things, and don't be afraid to go, you know what? It was good for that period of time. I'm going to put that in a box and move on to the next thing and keep innovating.

>> So much more. You can do A/B testing, content marketing, integrating things faster, save time.

Carolyn Crandall

>> All...

>> All good.

Carolyn Crandall

>> It's a competitive advantage. And I know there's security risks, and again, don't be feeding things into AI that you don't want out there, but there's lots of safe things that you can do that will help you become a stronger marketer.

>> Well, the backstop is a great example. You mentioned earlier, humans have to be in the loop, and obviously you can't run a brand campaign on AI. You don't know how this nation could create a lawsuit. Competitors sue you. Yeah, that's not true. Oh, okay.

Carolyn Crandall

>> No, it needs to be-

>> Little things like that matter.

Carolyn Crandall

>> Oh, they do. I mean, you need to feed it. Don't just ask it a question, expect it's going to do your job for you, but feed it the basic of what you want and then review it. It cannot be unsupervised. Kind of like my teenagers.

>> It's like going to school. Once you graduate, now you infer and reinforce, sounds like AI. Carolyn, thanks so much for coming and sharing your insights. Great to have you here.

Carolyn Crandall

>> It's great to be here. Thank you.

>> Okay, we are here for the CMO leaders. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. More coverage on day two with the NYSE, Wired and theCUBE. Thanks for watching.