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CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. on Tuesday announced a new effort at generative artificial intelligence — the type of natural language AI model popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT — and sparked hopes that the move will help alleviate a years-long talent gap in cybersecurity.
CrowdStrike
CRWD,
introduced Charlotte AI to its Falcon security platform Tuesday as a way of “democratizing” cybersecurity for all users within an organization, and “closing the cybersecurity skills gap and speeding the response time to stay ahead of adversaries.” The announcement arrived a day before the software company’s quarterly earnings report, expected after the bell on Wednesday.
One of the biggest uses CrowdStrike sees for Charlotte AI is the ability for any worker, no matter their technical expertise, to ask straightforward questions about a network vulnerability and get answers in real time. That could democratize jobs that focus on network security — the cybersecurity industry has dealt with a talent scarcity estimated in the ballpark of about 3 million workers for years, and AI has been seen as one technology that could alleviate that shortage.
Read from March 2019: Cybersecurity companies look to artificial intelligence as they struggle to find human workers
SVB MoffettNathanson analyst Sterling Auty, who has an outperform, said adding more AI to the platform matters because Crowdstrike “from the very beginning” has used “a graph database combined with machine learning algorithms to identify threats.”
Read: Wall Street tech darling Nvidia unveils more AI products — including a new supercomputer
“If executed properly this could go a long way in helping companies overcome the shortfall in qualified cybersecurity workers,” Auty said. “We have been falling behind on being able to identify and deal with security threats, but AI done correctly could level that playing field and the company(ies) that do it right and first will likely gain the lion’s share of the benefits.”
While Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
and SentinelOne
S,
have also announced AI-powered threat-hunting systems, Auty believed CrowdStrike’s may be the best of the three.
Read: AI could bring ‘extinction’ and requires nuclear-war-level preparations, experts warn
“Crowdstrike, we believe, offers a more compelling dataset than either Microsoft or SentinelOne and could take the lead here if executed properly,” Auty said. “Other vendors are working quickly to incorporate AI into their own products, but what we are talking about here is utilizing AI for the benefit of the employee on how they can react to security issues or remediate problems (forensics).”
Year to date, CrowdStrike shares are up 50%, while the ETFMG Prime Cyber Security ETF
HACK,
is up 11%, the S&P 500 index
SPX,
is up more than 9%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
is up 24%.
