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Wasim Khaled

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Blackbird.AI

play_circle_outline The Impact of Narrative Attacks on Financial Markets and Society: Differentiating from Fake News

play_circle_outline Blackbird AI's AI platform for quantifying and observing narrative attacks

play_circle_outline Risks associated with fake watermarks and NFTs in combatting manipulation

play_circle_outline Enhancing Analysis Capabilities through Posture Management and OSINT Research with Technology

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Wasim Khaled, Blackbird.AI

Wasim Khaled

CEO Blackbird.AI

Dave Vellante and John Furrier interview Wasim Khaled, CEO of Blackbird.AI, a company combating deepfakes and content manipulation. Their platform detects and analyzes narrative attacks with motives like financial gain or disrupting society. Khaled stresses the importance of defenses against these attacks, especially for CISOs, to protect reputation and financial stability. Blackbird.AI's technology combines AI and network analysis to address risks associated with narrative attacks. Investors see Blackbird.AI as a cybersecurity play. The conversation discusse... Read more

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What is a narrative attack and how is it different from fake news or alternative facts? add

What are the three main things that every executive team should understand about the AI platform that has been built over the last eight years? add

What are some challenges to preventing the spread of fake content with watermarks in images on blockchain solutions? add

What type of technology are they not using for posture management that could potentially accelerate their work and provide high resolution analysis at all times? add

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Wasim Khaled, Blackbird.AI

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to NYSE Wired and theCUBE's Media Week. This is our wall-to-wall coverage day three. Dave Vellante here. John Furrier is also in the house. The problem of deepfakes, lack of trust in content, content manipulation, it's a serious problem that is increasingly pervasive in our society. Wasim Khaled is the CEO and a founder of Blackbird.AI who deals with this problem. Thanks for coming in.

Wasim Khaled

>> Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, nice setup here. You guys, you've just done on with Trinity, so appreciate you guys making some time for us.

Wasim Khaled

>> Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Let me start with the company. You started the company in 2017, correct?

Wasim Khaled

>> That's right.

Dave Vellante

>> Why? Why'd you start the company?

Wasim Khaled

>> Well, I mean, my co-founder and I both thought that this was going to be an existential problem, really the problem of our time. It's not just really about disinformation, misinformation, but about manipulation of people's perception. We think of it today as a cyber attack on human perception and narrative manipulation, and it kind of touches every walk of life, enterprise, national security. And we'll talk about that a little bit today, but I think today now more than ever, I think that's relatable to everybody.

Dave Vellante

>> I mean, was it just a coincidence? It was the year after the 2016 election. I mean, certainly that was an escalation. I mean, so 2012, we saw social media play a big role in sort of a positive way. By 2016, it was all kinds of... People were talking about weaponization of social. The narrative changed. Obviously 2020 escalated, and now it's like, oh my gosh. So it was prescient. Did that have anything to do with... Was that a catalyst at all or was it just a convenient coincidence?

Wasim Khaled

>> It's kind of a coincidence. I mean, we have been thinking about this problem since 2014 really, and it was more about just how is it that certain people are so easily convinced about things that are happening that they see on the internet, otherwise very well-educated people? So it started as really almost like a technology experiment. Being computer scientists and AI researchers from way back, we wanted to see if we could quantify this problem of how people's perception can be shifted using information in our kind of open communication systems that we saw as being hijacked by, at the time, what was kind of a question mark, and we found a lot out since then.

Dave Vellante

>> So what is a narrative attack and how is it different from fake news or alternative facts or whatever other rubric you want to use?

Wasim Khaled

>> Sure. So a narrative attack is actually some language we developed to define this thing, because this is not really about fake news. It's not about what is true, what is not. It's not about removing content. It is about, again, that manipulation of the narrative. A narrative attack is any kind of assertion in the information ecosystem that can manipulate and shape perception about a person, a place, a thing, a product, what have you, and it's really about trade craft by state actors, by opportunistic threat actors that are trying to create some sort of financial outcome, societal outcome, reputational outcome for some sort of gain or ideology. And so it is this notion of the trade craft that we set out to detect, because no one wants to be manipulated, or they at least want to understand what is happening, right? And that was the approach there.

Dave Vellante

>> So I remember, I think it was last year if I recall, there was an incident, I can't remember exactly what it was. It was some kind of bomb went off or something at the Pentagon or something like that. The markets dropped momentarily. They came right back, so somebody obviously made some money off of that, I presume. It's still happening. So that's what you are out to protect against, is that right?

Wasim Khaled

>> Yeah, I remember that incident. So it was a doctored or deepfake type of imagery. That's one example, right? I mean, one thing is you have to understand the combination of synthetic media and the individuals that are out there trying to create that kind of a context to confuse people, disorient people, have them look over here while they're trying to create a different outcome in this area of the ecosystem. And if we really think about the kinds of impact, you mentioned financial markets, right, if you look at the Global Risk Report from the World Economic Forum, which just came out this morning, they put misinformation and disinformation right at number one for the next two years again. If you think about it in this world, that's number one. And then among that group of items, there's things like state conflict, cyber insecurity, extreme weather, and it still comes in first. Now, they call it misinformation, disinformation. We think of it again as this kind of narrative manipulation, but it's telling that this is seen as one of the biggest global threats of our time. And then if you look at something like the Forrester Threat Intelligence report, they're looking at cyber security and the ability to protect against narrative attacks. And we were really happy to see that Blackbird was featured as really the only company that actually has some sort of technology that can defend against these kinds of narrative attacks amongst other companies like CrowdStrike, Google and Microsoft listed that don't have these capabilities yet. And I guess the last thing to add is Gartner, they say there's going to be approximately $30 billion spent by enterprise organizations by 2028 fighting these kinds of problems. So it's critical that leaders and executive teams, organizations around the world have defenses against this kind of attack.

Dave Vellante

>> So is that your TAM? I mean, roughly, is that like a $30 billion TAM, or is it... I mean, it would seem to me they're going to spend that money with crisis management with a lot of people, and if you can automate that and streamline that, you can get a piece of that pie.

Wasim Khaled

>> A big piece of it. I see the TAM as even larger than that because there's a national security component, there's a cyber security component. And a lot of CISOs, like chief information security officers, threat intelligence teams, in addition to the comms teams, have been coming to us to understand how and why are these incidents occurring and how do we actually see it? How do we observe what's happening so we can get decision dominance around this problem before we get hit?

Dave Vellante

>> Is the why predominant... What are the patterns? Is the why predominantly financial gain? Is it to try to take out a competitor or wreak havoc in a society? What's the motivation here?

Wasim Khaled

>> I mean, all of the above, right? It really depends on the flavor of the actor that is trying to drive that outcome. But we've seen things like during an M&A, someone might get in there and try to change perception around that so they can be short-selling on the other side by creating a slowdown, fake memos, controversies, fabricated controversies. I mean, I would just think about today with generative AI and synthetic media getting as realistic as it is, on the day of a big launch, you could suddenly have a deepfaked group of insiders that work at the company just flooding the internet with some sort of a discussion around how this product doesn't work or that the whole thing is a fraud, and then you have everyone from the CEO to the shareholders to the board to the markets wondering, is this something that is actually true?

Dave Vellante

>> Oh wow, yeah. Right.

Wasim Khaled

>> These things are going to happen -

Dave Vellante

>> This product causes cancer. What?

Wasim Khaled

>> Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So let's get into how you combat that.

Wasim Khaled

>> Sure.

Dave Vellante

>> And the tech behind it.

Wasim Khaled

>> Yeah. So I mean, we've been building this tech for about eight years. It is an AI platform, and we have broken this kind of what seems like an amorphous mutating problem into something very quantitative, right? And that is three things I tell every executive team they have to understand that our technology can provide. One, what is this kind of mutating narrative and where does it actually live? How big is that narrative getting? But importantly, at the same time, how is it spreading like a contagion within the information ecosystem? Which areas of it are they infecting with this narrative? And then the third most important thing is, is there synthetic amplification? So are there bot networks or inauthentic coordinated activity propping up that narrative? Because that shows intention. This is not conversation. These are not people just talking about this thing. There is someone behind it driving a trade craft that is trying to get some sort of an outcome. Now, if you can't observe those kinds of things happening around your organization, you are going to get hit at some point. It could be something as simple as a statement on your HR policy on your website. It could be something the CEO says. If we think about UnitedHealthcare and executive protection, don't you want to know if the public is being riled up, especially in a fabricated way, against your organization or industry? These are just things that people have to look at. And again, it's why I think leaders are really waking up to the fact that if you don't know this, you can't do anything. You could spend $500 million on a marketing campaign that could be derailed overnight with a narrative attack.

Dave Vellante

>> So is your platform like an observation platform? Is it math? My other question is are you a cyber play in a way? But let's start with, again, I'm really intrigued. You've obviously got an observation space that you're infusing into your platform, and is there math behind it or are you just looking at you can understand patterns, whether or not something is organically viral? Explain that a little bit.

Wasim Khaled

>> Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, the technologies we've built, which is like the majority of it is artificial intelligence and big network analysis, it enables you to see all of these risk signals that were never before seen. So traditional monitoring platforms and intelligence platforms really only count keywords and look at sentiment. That's kind of like the bottom of the signal stack today. You have to be able to understand that spread and all of the different actor types and all of the different risk signals that indicate a narrative attack, velocity, impact. People talk about understanding if something's a deepfake. Well, how far did that deepfake travel? How many of the people did it touch and how many did it change their perception around that particular campaign? So you could think of it as a performance measurement on this campaign on the other side, right? So a traditional marketer might think of it like that, but the person who's running it, that nation could have spent billions of dollars building this trade craft. It could be a nation state, cyber criminal. So you're right, it is a cybersecurity play today more than ever. I mean, some of our investors include Dave DeWalt from NightDragon.

Dave Vellante

>> We know Dave.

Wasim Khaled

>> Yep.

Dave Vellante

>> Of course.

Wasim Khaled

>> I think a lot of the cyber players today and chief information security officers are coming to us to fill what they're starting to see as an intelligence gap, like any other new risk that comes up. I always think of it as this. You have this kind of battle space in the information ecosystem and defense always trails offense, and the offense on this particular problem has gotten massive and is being funded by a lot of dark money, cyber criminal actors, nation states. So you're going to want powerful technologies on the other side to defend against it. And just like cybersecurity and cyber intelligence, you need to keep ahead of it, and that's the only space we're focused in, and that's what we do for our customers.

Dave Vellante

>> What if tomorrow... This is off the wall. What if tomorrow, every piece of content was watermarked or NFT'd? What would that mean to your business?

Wasim Khaled

>> This is something we've talked about. Early days, we ourselves looked into crowdsourced blockchain solutions. So let's say images, right? Images could be watermarked. People can screenshot around them. They can still spread the narrative. The end user doesn't have the tool that's going to enable them to see if something is authentic or not.

Dave Vellante

>> So fake watermarked content.

Wasim Khaled

>> Fake watermarks are just cropping it out. I would think of it like this. The people who really need to understand these things don't really have those technologies and everyone would have to adopt it. I think the way to think about it is there are black market versions of every single AI model available today. So whether all of the big companies that are commercially providing these technologies, people will just go to the dark web like they always have and find the ungated versions that don't use those technologies anyway. The problem's out there, it's not going away.

Dave Vellante

>> So the probability of that happening is very, very low, to your point, almost impossible.

Wasim Khaled

>> Almost impossible. Everyone would need to adopt it, right?

Dave Vellante

>> But it's interesting that it's something that you've thought about because it ostensibly would be a risk to this tremendous value proposition you have, but it feels like you've got a runway before that happens.

Wasim Khaled

>> Oh yeah. I mean, let's just say that I think we've seen in the past 10 years to get everyone cooperating and kind of adopting the same thing, one from a monetary perspective is not going to happen because everyone builds these fragmented things. Take online payment systems, right? Everyone wanted to do one system, but then everyone realized, "Hey, we want our own system to do it," and now you have 50 of them, right, which is how we see the information ecosystem going. It's going to be more fragmented and more confusing for the average person to understand .

Dave Vellante

>> History would suggest you're right about that. I sort of alluded to before, you're sort of a cyber play because really, reducing risk is your primary value proposition, I think.

Wasim Khaled

>> For the cyber communities, yes. It's about understanding and measuring these risks so that you can mitigate and reduce them. On the comms side, crisis comms, things of that nature, it's also about opportunity mining because looking at the intelligence space in general today, if you can subtract out all of the manipulation, you can see what's actually happening and where you need to focus. If you can't cut that out, then when you're trying to look for opportunities, you're also being sent in the wrong direction. What your system sees as an opportunity could be what someone on the other side wants you to see. But it's a relevant conversation, because the market is about perception and one has to understand where that manipulation is.

Dave Vellante

>> That's still a risk avoidance use case, is it not, or am I not understanding? Are you aspirin or are you vitamins?

Wasim Khaled

>> I would say the majority of what we do is problem solving, risk reduction, risk detection.

Dave Vellante

>> That's the business case, right?

Wasim Khaled

>> That is the business case.

Dave Vellante

>> If I'm a CEO, I'm worried about my reputation. I'm worried about somebody manipulating my stock or my brand, and there's a probability of that happening, which if I'm a big target is pretty high. Even if I'm not a huge target, it could be. And so you're going to reduce that risk by some amount.

Wasim Khaled

>> Correct.

Dave Vellante

>> And presumably you can quantify that.

Wasim Khaled

>> The way to think about it is, yes, we can quantify the risk, and when we get in there, what they see is, "Hey, this thing is so high resolution that we can use it for other things as well," like opportunity.

Dave Vellante

>> And you're a software company.

Wasim Khaled

>> Yeah, it's an AI SaaS platform, cloud-based. So we can just drop in and operate very quickly.

Dave Vellante

>> Right. And so Palo Alto and CrowdStrike and CyberArk, they're all software companies too, but the reason why they trade somewhat higher valuation than some software companies is because it's their cybersecurity. So do we think of you in that same context?

Wasim Khaled

>> Yes. Yeah. I mean, you can see that even just looking at our investment portfolio. The people who are backing us right now who are pretty kind of forward-looking, are seeing this as a cybersecurity play. We've thought of it as a cybersecurity play, I've thought of it as a cybersecurity play since 2018. The market now is starting to see that as well. That wasn't always the case -

Dave Vellante

>> Do you sell it to CISOs?

Wasim Khaled

>> Yeah, absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Okay. Is that your primary-

Wasim Khaled

>> A lot of our pipeline and inbound today are CISOs, and I think in the next year, two years, that's the majority of where we're really selling.

Dave Vellante

>> Interesting. Is it because they're expanding their sphere of responsibility to risk broadly?

Wasim Khaled

>> For sure.

Dave Vellante

>> They've always been in the risk business, but they've been in the technical risk business, right?

Wasim Khaled

>> I think what ends up happening with CISOs is that you have these risk profiles that end up falling on them, like digital fraud management, identity management, KYC. Those weren't the purview of the CISO at one point, and then they had to just start doing it, right? The way I think about this, and the way they're starting to think about it is, in a world where these are cyber criminals who are running the campaigns in the first place, there are nation states running these campaigns, and they're hitting the organizations they're entrusted to protect, it certainly doesn't go to the PR person or the marketing person to solve those problems. It goes to the CISO and the threat intelligence directors. And so that is just naturally becoming where the market's going as opposed to two, three years ago where it was more the chief communications officer in crisis.

Dave Vellante

>> So if I'm a CISO or CEO or risk manager, what's the best way for me to protect myself against these threats?

Wasim Khaled

>> I mean, you have to fight fire with fire. You have to have a defensive technology platform to really let you understand how the other adversary is working, and today they can work unobserved. So I think about this as observability, almost night vision into what's happening in the information space so that again, you can have decision dominance at the highest level, at the board level, at the CEO level. How do you communicate these things to your customers? It's almost table stakes. In a couple of years, if you don't have this, it's going to be almost like not having intrusion detection within your network infrastructure today. It's going to be unheard of. But today it's new, and you see only really the sharpest CISOs and threat intelligence team starting to bring us in.

Dave Vellante

>> Are your competitors kind of do it yourself, cobbling together? Like you mentioned earlier in the Forrester Report, it was CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike doesn't really do this. They did do some posture management and things like that, which they're very good at, but they don't do this specifically. Do you-

Wasim Khaled

>> They don't do this using technology. I think traditionally this has been the purview of OSINT, so Open Source Intelligence Analysts, that are doing work with a basket of tools and basically doing PDF as a service, and then someone has to read that and it's like a snapshot, and then you're kind of not really seeing what's happening in the next moment and the next moment, right? What we're really providing often to those teams is how do we make one person able to do the work of a hundred of those analysts? Because again, we're a generative AI company. We're building our first AI agent model to do this. So how do you accelerate them and be able to do it always on, 24/7 at this very high resolution that they never would've seen before? So these could be our partners. These really large cyber firms, we could easily deploy their team of technology to do this.

Dave Vellante

>> Do you have any direct competitors that do what you do? Are they out there?

Wasim Khaled

>> So there's startups out there that are doing... I guess their marketing is similar, right? They don't actually have a scalable technology platform that has the depth that we have. At least that's what our customer tell us.

Dave Vellante

>> But they want a piece of that more than $30 billion TAM. So I mean, hey, look, if you're-

Wasim Khaled

>> That's the market, right, so that's-

Dave Vellante

>> If you're funded by, which you are... Well, who are your backers?

Wasim Khaled

>> So NightDragon is one. We have Ten Eleven Ventures, which is a pure play cybersecurity investor, Dorilton Capital.

Dave Vellante

>> Right. So those guys, they're players. People watch what they do and say, "Hey, must be a big market there." And you've raised, it it correct, 32 million, is that right, or is that an outdated number?

Wasim Khaled

>> We will make an announcement probably in the next week or two, but yeah, we've raised-

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, that's what Google said.

Wasim Khaled

>> Yeah. Yeah. So far we've raised 32. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. All right, great. And you're in the process of looking for more capital, right?

Wasim Khaled

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Good.

Wasim Khaled

>> Always.

Dave Vellante

>> IPO in your future someday?

Wasim Khaled

>> I mean, I saw our logo on here a little while ago. It's pretty good .

Dave Vellante

>> We'd love to have you back when that happens.

Wasim Khaled

>> Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Wasim, thanks so much for coming out.

Wasim Khaled

>> Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> I really appreciate it.

Wasim Khaled

>> Appreciate it.

Dave Vellante

>> All right. Keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier, NYSE Wired in theCube's Media Week. Coverage continues right after this short break.