Chithra Rajagopalan of Obsidian, senior vice president of finance, joins theCUBE Research hosts John Furrier and Gabe Olave to discuss how finance leaders reshape operations as artificial intelligence, AI and agents integrate into the enterprise. Rajagopalan draws on a finance and security background to address capital allocation following recent financing, cross-functional orchestration and data hygiene, evolving responsibilities in the C-suite, and practical implications for revenue and productivity in modern business models.
Rajagopalan emphasizes the expanding role of the chief financial officer, CFO, as a business architect and the necessity of prioritizing data hygiene before AI deployment. They recommend close collaboration with information technology, IT and governance risk and compliance, GRC. They also advise real-time monitoring of agent workflows and quantifying breach risk to protect management trust and shareholder value.
TheCUBE analysts John Furrier and Gabe Olave highlight revenue implications and the competitive advantage of secure AI adoption.
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Chithra Rajagopalan, Obsidian Security
Chithra Rajagopalan of Obsidian, senior vice president of finance, joins theCUBE Research hosts John Furrier and Gabe Olave to discuss how finance leaders reshape operations as artificial intelligence, AI and agents integrate into the enterprise. Rajagopalan draws on a finance and security background to address capital allocation following recent financing, cross-functional orchestration and data hygiene, evolving responsibilities in the C-suite, and practical implications for revenue and productivity in modern business models.
Rajagopalan emphasizes the expanding role of the chief financial officer, CFO, as a business architect and the necessity of prioritizing data hygiene before AI deployment. They recommend close collaboration with information technology, IT and governance risk and compliance, GRC. They also advise real-time monitoring of agent workflows and quantifying breach risk to protect management trust and shareholder value.
TheCUBE analysts John Furrier and Gabe Olave highlight revenue implications and the competitive advantage of secure AI adoption.
>> I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Transformation Edge series where the business models are transforming with AI. and as intelligence gets injected into the business, how business is architected, measured, and instrumented to drive revenue, reduce costs, and make people more productive is changing the dynamics in the C-suite. And we're exploring that concept here and how people are thinking about it, and we're bringing in the leaders to have those conversations. Chithra's here. She's the CFO of Obsidian Security, recently raised $85 million, billions of dollars of valuation, Unicorn status. Chithra, thanks for coming in. Good to see you.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
John Furrier
>> So it's a double win to have you here. One, on the heels of the big news on the financing, you're the CFO, so you got fresh funding, dry powder. Congratulations.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> And the CFO is a big role in the C-suite as AI becomes the blueprint rethinking of how companies operate. So it's not like the ledgers and tracking cash. You still do that. But AI is going to change a lot of the mechanics in the business, staffing, agents, costs, relationships, revenues impacted, productivity. You happen to be in security, so that's going to help you with your product. So as a CFO, you see everything. So first of all, what's your view on this new dynamic in the C-suite? What's the current state of mind of the C-suite as you look at the future? What do you think about?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yeah, great question. I think back in the day when you thought about data and vendor security, you always kind of had this perspective that, okay, my data security is my vendor's problem. I'm just going to make sure that I hold them responsible. I don't think that's the case anymore. There is a lot of responsibility we as C-suite need to absorb. And I think the dynamic is shifting. And as somebody who is from a finance leadership standpoint, I always tell my team that every day from a day to day operations standpoint, we look at the most sensitive data of the company. Whether it's employee data, your customer data, your financial statements. So all that is very much critical. So with that kind of power comes great responsibility like Spider-Man's uncle said. But that's actually a real thing. So how does that conversation change? And how do you work and partner with the rest of the C-suite and your IT team and your GRC team to have this conversation and have a real understanding, okay, where does my responsibility lie? And what kind of questions are you asking to make sure you feel confident that my data is secure and how the infrastructure is set up is actually going to benefit me in the most responsible way?
John Furrier
>> this series was a motivation from many conversations over a year ago with CFOs when we wanted to understand how they were thinking about their business.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> We also were thinking about, okay, what are their needs? Turns out there's a huge appetite in the CFO and the non -CIO, CISO, C -suite around AI. They're learning, they're going back to school. But Jim Kavanaugh at IBM really crystallized this when I interviewed him, because he's transformed IBM, and he brings up the leadership concept. Leadership is a huge responsibility for CFOs not just inside the department. Because transformation is an internal operation, too. So there's a lot of ops that are impacted by the money, how you direct capital, you guys just raised 85 million dollars in financing. You've got to prioritize that capital.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> Where does it go? What's the operational impact? So you have to be the architect of the business model.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> That's a very, very good point, because that's exactly what we have discussed internally as a team as well. So my function today, my purview as such, includes finance, core finance, tax, accounting, FP &A, as well as revenue operations. So how we look at things in a more strategic way. With the role of AI, things have shifted quite a bit. How you think about entry-level roles, how you think about analyst roles have shifted very drastically. So how I think about hiring has also changed. And when I think about my team, I set the expectation that we all need to be orchestrators, architects. The work can be done by AI. So if you're not able to think from a strategic standpoint, an architectural framework standpoint, you wouldn't know how to best utilize AI, in my opinion. So the architecture part of it has to be strong. And that also comes with the foundation of data. So your AI, I feel like, is very useless if your underlying data hygiene is actually not in a good spot. You are not going to get the productivity you're kind of looking for. And I think a lot of companies did run into this very issue where they're like, oh, AI is going to solve all problems. But you kind of have to clean up the house a little bit before you implement that. So the orchestration layer is extremely important. And that's how I'm trying to set up my team.
John Furrier
>> I love the cleaning the house up. get ready for the party, the AI party. It's like having the people over. One of the things that's come up too in the CFO, while I have you here, it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on is, the CFO purview and department, traditionally, not now, but in the old way, was that they were a customer of IT. Now with AI, you have access to data systems, your reports, you have data. So there's been a little shadow IT going on in these departments where they can taste success And as a user, and also as a business line leader, you go, okay, I get it. Now, okay, hey, IT. So now it's almost reverted to driving demand from the business unit, in this case, your department. That's spawned an awareness, but also a realization. So how have you thought about that piece? Because you have access to data. You probably have a nice clean house. You have the finance department. I'm sure there's various areas to work on. But what are you guys doing? How have you looked at that lens, and how has that changed your scope?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yeah, actually this topic has kind of a two-fold effect just because I'm a finance leader, but also a finance leader at a security company is a little bit of a twist. So when you think about IT and the GRC partnership, this was something I valued throughout my career, but it did give me a very different perspective as soon as I started at Obsidian because there were elements to it that I was like, It was more of an eye-opening event for me. Because how you think about app-to-app configuration, how you think about data moving between apps, this is a very vulnerable spot. So when I am connecting my NetSuite with the CRM, with an HRIS system, with Slack, with many others that I can think of, these are all vulnerabilities that I'm creating for the team. So this was something that I, even myself, I thought of it. Okay, this is IT's problem, they're going to figure it out. But I think I also took a step back and said, okay, this is a team project. Let's figure out how we are protecting our infrastructure. What is required for this? It's not about just securing.
John Furrier
>> Well, you're driving the requirements, hence,
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> the security posture.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely, absolutely. And not just posture, I would also say that it's also understanding the entire landscape of who is utilizing, for what is it being utilized, and what are the different connections you have. So think of MITRE's models, right? They're going after any vulnerabilities you have in the system, in your entire infrastructure. So just because you protected your Salesforce and NetSuite, which are your larger applications, that's not going to be enough. They are still going after your tiny SaaS applications.
John Furrier
>> There's a long tail of exposure, big time.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> The big elephants are protected, but then the mice are out there. We've heard that analogy, elephants and mice. There's a lot of mice out there.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> There are a lot of mice out there that are going to attack through them, will attack your elephants, right? So I think that is what you need to protect. And that happens by having a really robust understanding of what is actually out there. Who has access to what? Are your admins, do they have MFAs? Do they have SSOs? You really need to understand the security landscape. Are you going to fix everything overnight? No, I don't think so. But then, I think the problem statement needs to be defined.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I think that's a great point you just illuminated because one narrative we've been having a lot on theCUBE recently is, of course, we love AI infrastructure, the most popular category right now, agents as well. Security, after Black Hat, my big revelation was kind of validated, which is, okay, security is horizontal. It's in every area.
John Furrier
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> And so it's kind of an infrastructure pillar as well as an application. You're starting to see security as code. That's a DevOps concept. You're starting to see this long tail of surface area with AI be exposed. Concepts like protect the protector. There's all kinds of new paradigms that hit every department. So now when you look at the other departments, like customer satisfaction, customer success, or sales, they have their systems. So as the architect, what's the purview like? What's it like in the departments? And what's the approach?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely. So I think there are so many AI tools coming out every single day. There's definitely an overwhelming amount of noise. So it really boils down to what is the company prioritizing? Because everything at the end of the day, yeah, you can buy 10 different applications to go and solve for this, but do you really need that? I think it really boils down to, what is the company trying to achieve? And within the team, are you guys set up in the right way, with the right resources, with the right architectures, to be able to go and accomplish that? Because if you remember, when the original hype came about, this was early in the year, everybody was excited, oh, I can totally vibe code this. I don't need Salesforce, let me just vibe code Salesforce. That's not how it works, right?
John Furrier
>> Exactly.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Is that what you really want to do, right? And you kind of see the token costs going up really dramatically. And we were also trying to get our hands on what is exactly happening. So it really boils down to how are you thinking about internal policies and how are you thinking about infrastructure and workflows around your employees to enable them to innovate by not being irresponsible. I would say responsibly by understanding what it is that you're trying to accomplish at the end of the day but at the same time be economical with companies assets and at the same time you're being secure right and if you think about all the models that are coming out today there is going to be more and more innovation the thing is that with the innovation and the speed at which we are going about things is so much higher everything is so accelerated and I feel like there is going to be a situation where you'll have so many choices, and at the end of the day, it all boils down to decision making around, is it saving me money, and is it safe? That's what people are going to go after. So I think it's a great question to ask ourselves while we are choosing other applications or different models that we want to go after or different implementations that we're doing, is it ultimately giving us the goal that we want to go after from a company standpoint? Is it saving us money? Is it being economical? And is it safe?
John Furrier
>> On the economic side, how much of the conversation is revenue? That's the one thing I think that's changed from my years watching these many waves. This wave has all the coolness of every single other wave. Infrastructure, up and down the stack, security, data. If you're a data geek, it's the best time to be an engineer. You're starting to see systems of intelligence, systems of adaptation, but revenue is in almost all the conversation. That's a CFO thing, so you've got productivity, which translates to economics. How is that playing out in your mind? What's your vision there? Because remember, you're going to have a sales team that might have nice protection, certainly you guys will be tight on security, that's cool, but they want to be more successful. They're going to drive more revenue. How are agents going to help them? How is this all going to get deployed? The CFO's got to think about the revenue piece, so it's not just, here's your budget, hire more headcount. They might say, I'll have a headcount and 10 agents, or every sales call's monitored with voice instrumentation. Let's roll that up. What's the best pitch?
John Furrier
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> These are the things that we're seeing currently in the ChatGPT era. Revenue. What's your... You're smiling because you love revenue. Love revenue.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> I know. Love revenue. I think this is a million-dollar question, right? How do you measure productivity of an agent? And how do you measure productivity of a workflow that you're implementing. I think this was kind of like the problem statement of every single panel and roundtables I've been to in the last couple of months. And I think it kind of all distills down to, in my opinion, it's a very department -specific question. Where I've seen an enormous amount of productivity is engineering teams, marketing teams, customer success, TAM organizations. They have been able to really go and capture that extra element of productivity and really be able to boost how they're thinking about what the outcome is that they want to drive. So this was very interesting. And the number of folks that we had to hire in one of these, all of these departments actually was cut short quite a bit initially. And we replaced it all with AI. So I think that is...
John Furrier
>> And you're seeing some traction there.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely seeing traction. And I think these are amazing use cases that every company should adopt. So I think that's the, we are in that innovation and technology boost. And I think to your point, we are fortunate to be in this era. And I think we should innovate at a pace at which we have never done before. And I think security should not be an obstacle for that. And I think that is our mission. And that is what we want to help enterprises do. because if you think about it, all the Fortune 1000, G2000 companies, even Fortune 500, let's say, they have a lot of red tape. It's not easy to just deploy an agent and go have fun with it. And there's a reason for that. And security is a big obstacle.
John Furrier
>> And that could impact your economics. Security is a big piece.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> One final question for you, because when you guys announced the financing, and I interviewed Hasan, and we talked about the coolness of what you guys have, and congratulations, by the way.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> That goes into your bank account, under your purview, you get to divvy the cash up. I'm sure you're very popular. The thing about ecosystem partnerships, companies and their business models, they have relationships. They have business partners, sometimes there's economic deals involved, money changes hands, now you have agents, you might have digital transactions of some sort, technical and business, as you mentioned earlier, applications talking to each other inside your company, but now you have an external view. How do you guys look at that? Because you have to monitor that too, that's going to impact procurement, supplier relationships, that's going to impact business model, if it's a business deal, someone's hitting an API. So as you look at that kind of connected ecosystem, how do you view that as a CFO in this modern era?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yes, so I think it all starts with awareness built within your team as well, right? Because we are fortunate to be able to sit at a point where we do see the top logos out there and how bad actors are going about an attack so I think we have a lot of core network intelligence that we have adopted to our product and of course we drink our own Kool-Aid so we adopt
John Furrier
>> it yeah you are your own customer
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> yes we are our own customer and that is important in my opinion because we are also thinking from a first principle standpoint how are we thinking about security within our own team? And this does come up around, it always boils down to who has access to our critical data and what are they accessing, why are they accessing, and how is it that we are measuring and real-time monitoring. Because you can't just look at governance as one pillar. Governance is half the story. Of course, we can give you a view around what do you have, what is the configuration, how are things set up. but once you deploy the agent, it's runtime. Do you have a tool that in case the agent goes rogue or goes in a different direction, do you have a tool that's able to immediately block it and give you a heads up and does this in real time and you have high efficacy and trust in the system?
John Furrier
>> Chithra, great to have you on, really appreciate your time. I guess my final, final question would be, what's your advice to other CFOs as they're all wrestling with this because it's the business model architecture.
John Furrier
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> Is changing.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> They're involved, the C -Suite's involved, the CIO, the CISO, certainly in your area. What advice would you give to your fellow CFOs on how to ride the wave, the velocity, that's moving super, super fast?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely. So I think one takeaway I would love for all the finance leaders to go out there with is a breach is not a monetary thing. It's about management trust. your share prices, your quarterly results, everything from top line to bottom line, everything gets affected. So please look into how you want to quantify this breach is going to be extremely important. So talk to your IT team, talk to your GRC team, form a group, ask tough questions. Is my data protected? Who has access to what? Do we have the right kind of configurations in our infrastructure to be able to protect the most important data. And look at your shadow IT and agentic workflows and see what are some of the loose ends that need to be tightened up or even cut.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, tie down those loose ends. And ultimately it's competitive edge.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> Transformation Edge is the competitive edge. Business Transformation Edge is the series. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We explore all the challenges and the opportunities that AI is going to present for the modern enterprise, of modern business as AI is injected into the company. It's going to impact all departments. And, of course, it's going to drive productivity, which is revenue, and, of course, manage costs. And, of course, the humans are involved. The agents are doing work. More to come here in the series. Thanks for watching.
>> I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Transformation Edge series where the business models are transforming with AI. and as intelligence gets injected into the business, how business is architected, measured, and instrumented to drive revenue, reduce costs, and make people more productive is changing the dynamics in the C-suite. And we're exploring that concept here and how people are thinking about it, and we're bringing in the leaders to have those conversations. Chithra's here. She's the CFO of Obsidian Security, recently raised $85 million, billions of dollars of valuation, Unicorn status. Chithra, thanks for coming in. Good to see you.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
John Furrier
>> So it's a double win to have you here. One, on the heels of the big news on the financing, you're the CFO, so you got fresh funding, dry powder. Congratulations.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> And the CFO is a big role in the C-suite as AI becomes the blueprint rethinking of how companies operate. So it's not like the ledgers and tracking cash. You still do that. But AI is going to change a lot of the mechanics in the business, staffing, agents, costs, relationships, revenues impacted, productivity. You happen to be in security, so that's going to help you with your product. So as a CFO, you see everything. So first of all, what's your view on this new dynamic in the C-suite? What's the current state of mind of the C-suite as you look at the future? What do you think about?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yeah, great question. I think back in the day when you thought about data and vendor security, you always kind of had this perspective that, okay, my data security is my vendor's problem. I'm just going to make sure that I hold them responsible. I don't think that's the case anymore. There is a lot of responsibility we as C-suite need to absorb. And I think the dynamic is shifting. And as somebody who is from a finance leadership standpoint, I always tell my team that every day from a day to day operations standpoint, we look at the most sensitive data of the company. Whether it's employee data, your customer data, your financial statements. So all that is very much critical. So with that kind of power comes great responsibility like Spider-Man's uncle said. But that's actually a real thing. So how does that conversation change? And how do you work and partner with the rest of the C-suite and your IT team and your GRC team to have this conversation and have a real understanding, okay, where does my responsibility lie? And what kind of questions are you asking to make sure you feel confident that my data is secure and how the infrastructure is set up is actually going to benefit me in the most responsible way?
John Furrier
>> this series was a motivation from many conversations over a year ago with CFOs when we wanted to understand how they were thinking about their business.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> We also were thinking about, okay, what are their needs? Turns out there's a huge appetite in the CFO and the non -CIO, CISO, C -suite around AI. They're learning, they're going back to school. But Jim Kavanaugh at IBM really crystallized this when I interviewed him, because he's transformed IBM, and he brings up the leadership concept. Leadership is a huge responsibility for CFOs not just inside the department. Because transformation is an internal operation, too. So there's a lot of ops that are impacted by the money, how you direct capital, you guys just raised 85 million dollars in financing. You've got to prioritize that capital.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> Where does it go? What's the operational impact? So you have to be the architect of the business model.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> That's a very, very good point, because that's exactly what we have discussed internally as a team as well. So my function today, my purview as such, includes finance, core finance, tax, accounting, FP &A, as well as revenue operations. So how we look at things in a more strategic way. With the role of AI, things have shifted quite a bit. How you think about entry-level roles, how you think about analyst roles have shifted very drastically. So how I think about hiring has also changed. And when I think about my team, I set the expectation that we all need to be orchestrators, architects. The work can be done by AI. So if you're not able to think from a strategic standpoint, an architectural framework standpoint, you wouldn't know how to best utilize AI, in my opinion. So the architecture part of it has to be strong. And that also comes with the foundation of data. So your AI, I feel like, is very useless if your underlying data hygiene is actually not in a good spot. You are not going to get the productivity you're kind of looking for. And I think a lot of companies did run into this very issue where they're like, oh, AI is going to solve all problems. But you kind of have to clean up the house a little bit before you implement that. So the orchestration layer is extremely important. And that's how I'm trying to set up my team.
John Furrier
>> I love the cleaning the house up. get ready for the party, the AI party. It's like having the people over. One of the things that's come up too in the CFO, while I have you here, it's interesting, I want to get your thoughts on is, the CFO purview and department, traditionally, not now, but in the old way, was that they were a customer of IT. Now with AI, you have access to data systems, your reports, you have data. So there's been a little shadow IT going on in these departments where they can taste success And as a user, and also as a business line leader, you go, okay, I get it. Now, okay, hey, IT. So now it's almost reverted to driving demand from the business unit, in this case, your department. That's spawned an awareness, but also a realization. So how have you thought about that piece? Because you have access to data. You probably have a nice clean house. You have the finance department. I'm sure there's various areas to work on. But what are you guys doing? How have you looked at that lens, and how has that changed your scope?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yeah, actually this topic has kind of a two-fold effect just because I'm a finance leader, but also a finance leader at a security company is a little bit of a twist. So when you think about IT and the GRC partnership, this was something I valued throughout my career, but it did give me a very different perspective as soon as I started at Obsidian because there were elements to it that I was like, It was more of an eye-opening event for me. Because how you think about app-to-app configuration, how you think about data moving between apps, this is a very vulnerable spot. So when I am connecting my NetSuite with the CRM, with an HRIS system, with Slack, with many others that I can think of, these are all vulnerabilities that I'm creating for the team. So this was something that I, even myself, I thought of it. Okay, this is IT's problem, they're going to figure it out. But I think I also took a step back and said, okay, this is a team project. Let's figure out how we are protecting our infrastructure. What is required for this? It's not about just securing.
John Furrier
>> Well, you're driving the requirements, hence,
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> the security posture.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely, absolutely. And not just posture, I would also say that it's also understanding the entire landscape of who is utilizing, for what is it being utilized, and what are the different connections you have. So think of MITRE's models, right? They're going after any vulnerabilities you have in the system, in your entire infrastructure. So just because you protected your Salesforce and NetSuite, which are your larger applications, that's not going to be enough. They are still going after your tiny SaaS applications.
John Furrier
>> There's a long tail of exposure, big time.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> The big elephants are protected, but then the mice are out there. We've heard that analogy, elephants and mice. There's a lot of mice out there.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> There are a lot of mice out there that are going to attack through them, will attack your elephants, right? So I think that is what you need to protect. And that happens by having a really robust understanding of what is actually out there. Who has access to what? Are your admins, do they have MFAs? Do they have SSOs? You really need to understand the security landscape. Are you going to fix everything overnight? No, I don't think so. But then, I think the problem statement needs to be defined.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I think that's a great point you just illuminated because one narrative we've been having a lot on theCUBE recently is, of course, we love AI infrastructure, the most popular category right now, agents as well. Security, after Black Hat, my big revelation was kind of validated, which is, okay, security is horizontal. It's in every area.
John Furrier
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> And so it's kind of an infrastructure pillar as well as an application. You're starting to see security as code. That's a DevOps concept. You're starting to see this long tail of surface area with AI be exposed. Concepts like protect the protector. There's all kinds of new paradigms that hit every department. So now when you look at the other departments, like customer satisfaction, customer success, or sales, they have their systems. So as the architect, what's the purview like? What's it like in the departments? And what's the approach?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely. So I think there are so many AI tools coming out every single day. There's definitely an overwhelming amount of noise. So it really boils down to what is the company prioritizing? Because everything at the end of the day, yeah, you can buy 10 different applications to go and solve for this, but do you really need that? I think it really boils down to, what is the company trying to achieve? And within the team, are you guys set up in the right way, with the right resources, with the right architectures, to be able to go and accomplish that? Because if you remember, when the original hype came about, this was early in the year, everybody was excited, oh, I can totally vibe code this. I don't need Salesforce, let me just vibe code Salesforce. That's not how it works, right?
John Furrier
>> Exactly.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Is that what you really want to do, right? And you kind of see the token costs going up really dramatically. And we were also trying to get our hands on what is exactly happening. So it really boils down to how are you thinking about internal policies and how are you thinking about infrastructure and workflows around your employees to enable them to innovate by not being irresponsible. I would say responsibly by understanding what it is that you're trying to accomplish at the end of the day but at the same time be economical with companies assets and at the same time you're being secure right and if you think about all the models that are coming out today there is going to be more and more innovation the thing is that with the innovation and the speed at which we are going about things is so much higher everything is so accelerated and I feel like there is going to be a situation where you'll have so many choices, and at the end of the day, it all boils down to decision making around, is it saving me money, and is it safe? That's what people are going to go after. So I think it's a great question to ask ourselves while we are choosing other applications or different models that we want to go after or different implementations that we're doing, is it ultimately giving us the goal that we want to go after from a company standpoint? Is it saving us money? Is it being economical? And is it safe?
John Furrier
>> On the economic side, how much of the conversation is revenue? That's the one thing I think that's changed from my years watching these many waves. This wave has all the coolness of every single other wave. Infrastructure, up and down the stack, security, data. If you're a data geek, it's the best time to be an engineer. You're starting to see systems of intelligence, systems of adaptation, but revenue is in almost all the conversation. That's a CFO thing, so you've got productivity, which translates to economics. How is that playing out in your mind? What's your vision there? Because remember, you're going to have a sales team that might have nice protection, certainly you guys will be tight on security, that's cool, but they want to be more successful. They're going to drive more revenue. How are agents going to help them? How is this all going to get deployed? The CFO's got to think about the revenue piece, so it's not just, here's your budget, hire more headcount. They might say, I'll have a headcount and 10 agents, or every sales call's monitored with voice instrumentation. Let's roll that up. What's the best pitch?
John Furrier
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> These are the things that we're seeing currently in the ChatGPT era. Revenue. What's your... You're smiling because you love revenue. Love revenue.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> I know. Love revenue. I think this is a million-dollar question, right? How do you measure productivity of an agent? And how do you measure productivity of a workflow that you're implementing. I think this was kind of like the problem statement of every single panel and roundtables I've been to in the last couple of months. And I think it kind of all distills down to, in my opinion, it's a very department -specific question. Where I've seen an enormous amount of productivity is engineering teams, marketing teams, customer success, TAM organizations. They have been able to really go and capture that extra element of productivity and really be able to boost how they're thinking about what the outcome is that they want to drive. So this was very interesting. And the number of folks that we had to hire in one of these, all of these departments actually was cut short quite a bit initially. And we replaced it all with AI. So I think that is...
John Furrier
>> And you're seeing some traction there.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely seeing traction. And I think these are amazing use cases that every company should adopt. So I think that's the, we are in that innovation and technology boost. And I think to your point, we are fortunate to be in this era. And I think we should innovate at a pace at which we have never done before. And I think security should not be an obstacle for that. And I think that is our mission. And that is what we want to help enterprises do. because if you think about it, all the Fortune 1000, G2000 companies, even Fortune 500, let's say, they have a lot of red tape. It's not easy to just deploy an agent and go have fun with it. And there's a reason for that. And security is a big obstacle.
John Furrier
>> And that could impact your economics. Security is a big piece.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> One final question for you, because when you guys announced the financing, and I interviewed Hasan, and we talked about the coolness of what you guys have, and congratulations, by the way.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> That goes into your bank account, under your purview, you get to divvy the cash up. I'm sure you're very popular. The thing about ecosystem partnerships, companies and their business models, they have relationships. They have business partners, sometimes there's economic deals involved, money changes hands, now you have agents, you might have digital transactions of some sort, technical and business, as you mentioned earlier, applications talking to each other inside your company, but now you have an external view. How do you guys look at that? Because you have to monitor that too, that's going to impact procurement, supplier relationships, that's going to impact business model, if it's a business deal, someone's hitting an API. So as you look at that kind of connected ecosystem, how do you view that as a CFO in this modern era?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yes, so I think it all starts with awareness built within your team as well, right? Because we are fortunate to be able to sit at a point where we do see the top logos out there and how bad actors are going about an attack so I think we have a lot of core network intelligence that we have adopted to our product and of course we drink our own Kool-Aid so we adopt
John Furrier
>> it yeah you are your own customer
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> yes we are our own customer and that is important in my opinion because we are also thinking from a first principle standpoint how are we thinking about security within our own team? And this does come up around, it always boils down to who has access to our critical data and what are they accessing, why are they accessing, and how is it that we are measuring and real-time monitoring. Because you can't just look at governance as one pillar. Governance is half the story. Of course, we can give you a view around what do you have, what is the configuration, how are things set up. but once you deploy the agent, it's runtime. Do you have a tool that in case the agent goes rogue or goes in a different direction, do you have a tool that's able to immediately block it and give you a heads up and does this in real time and you have high efficacy and trust in the system?
John Furrier
>> Chithra, great to have you on, really appreciate your time. I guess my final, final question would be, what's your advice to other CFOs as they're all wrestling with this because it's the business model architecture.
John Furrier
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> Is changing.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> They're involved, the C -Suite's involved, the CIO, the CISO, certainly in your area. What advice would you give to your fellow CFOs on how to ride the wave, the velocity, that's moving super, super fast?
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Absolutely. So I think one takeaway I would love for all the finance leaders to go out there with is a breach is not a monetary thing. It's about management trust. your share prices, your quarterly results, everything from top line to bottom line, everything gets affected. So please look into how you want to quantify this breach is going to be extremely important. So talk to your IT team, talk to your GRC team, form a group, ask tough questions. Is my data protected? Who has access to what? Do we have the right kind of configurations in our infrastructure to be able to protect the most important data. And look at your shadow IT and agentic workflows and see what are some of the loose ends that need to be tightened up or even cut.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, tie down those loose ends. And ultimately it's competitive edge.
Chithra Rajagopalan
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> Transformation Edge is the competitive edge. Business Transformation Edge is the series. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We explore all the challenges and the opportunities that AI is going to present for the modern enterprise, of modern business as AI is injected into the company. It's going to impact all departments. And, of course, it's going to drive productivity, which is revenue, and, of course, manage costs. And, of course, the humans are involved. The agents are doing work. More to come here in the series. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier
