Bryan Palma on Digital Workforce Security at KB4-CON 2026

Hey everyone, we're back here at KB4Con in Orlando, continuing our day full of coverage here. It's been an exciting morning so far. We're going to end our morning off with our CEO interview.

I want to introduce you all to Brian Palmer, who's the CEO of KnowBe4. Brian, first of all, welcome to Techstrong TV, man. Thank you for having me, and thanks for being here and covering the whole day.

Pretty cool, Alan. I appreciate... You know what?

As it turned out, I think I maybe did six this morning. I love it. Three of the people I've known for 20 years.

I love it. So- That's fun. Well, you and I are getting to know each other.

Absolutely. But excited to be here. What a, I don't want to use the word stable, because stable is for animals.

That's right. But what a lineup- Yeah ... of some impressive people.

Yeah, it's been great. No, look- It's been really cool ... we've had a great day and a half.

We got half a day left today, and then tomorrow morning. We're excited. We're getting lots of great feedback from our customers.

So, this is our ninth year doing it, Alan. Really? Yeah.

So next year's going to be a 10 year anniversary. A big one. Yeah, that's a big one.

So we're going to have to go big next year. But this year we're up about 40% across the board. I was just going to say.

Yeah. Talking about go big. Yeah.

Is this the biggest you guys have done? It is. It's the biggest we've done, and it's 40% up over last year, which is amazing.

Which is huge. So yeah. Huge.

And we're looking to keep that momentum going. Good for you, man. Absolutely.

Congratulations. Thank you. Brian, you've been at the helm here now about a year.

Yeah. For our audience out there- Sure ... give us your arc, your career journey.

Yeah, yeah. How did you wind up here? Yeah, look, I've been doing the cybersecurity thing since really the late '90s, a long time.

Me too. I don't know where time goes, right? Started off in the Secret Service, started off in computer forensics.

Did a lot of work in that area, then went on to be a CISO. So I think it's one of the things that's always differentiated me in my career is I've been a customer before. A lot of my peers, a lot of CEOs, have always been on the- The vendor ...

sell side. They've always been on the vendor side. I've actually, at PepsiCo for four years, built an information security team.

So that was exciting. And then I went through a number of companies where I ran cybersecurity, I ran tech businesses as big as $3 billion. Before I came here, I ran the combination of FireEye and McAfee.

Oh, really? Sure. It got bought by private equity, put that together.

We renamed it Trellix. I was the CEO over there for about four years. And then I had this opportunity, and I got to tell you, Alan, I was so excited, and it was almost a year ago.

Mm-hmm. May 5th is when I started. KnowBe4 Con last year was actually in April.

Okay. And I had taken the CEO job already. So it was public.

But I came undercover. Right. I came undercover.

And look, it's just an amazing company. Stu did a phenomenal job over 15 years building the company. I really did my homework.

" The answer was yes. We have patents back to 2016. Our ADA product has been around and being built since 2018.

At that time, we had eight agents in market since December of '24. So when I looked at the tech and I looked at the product market fit, I was super excited about it. And then the financials of the company are great as well.

So- And that doesn't hurt That doesn't hurt. Doesn't hurt. That never hurts.

Exactly. And Vista's a great owner. This is one of the most important investments in their portfolio.

They're leaning in, and they've been great partners. I love it. Yeah.

Brian, so look, like you, I got into security in the late '90s. Yeah. Started some companies, co-founded a few venture-backed companies with it.

Sure. And did the whole thing, and wound up on the media side of things about 12 years ago. Yep.

But KnowBe4 has always been known, look, great security training company. Yeah. Absolutely.

Great security awareness training. Probably the leader. Absolutely.

As I did in my last interview with your SVP- Sure ... of training, that market has morphed, right? Sure.

It's not like when we were younger and someone went and spent two days, got a cert- That's right ... and they were trained. That's right.

Right? Now it's almost a continuous ongoing kind of thing. That's right.

And the way people consume information- That's right ... is different, right? They're not into sitting in a classroom for eight hours.

That's right. They take it at their own speed, at their own pace. You guys have really done a great job of responding.

Yeah. Combining entertainment- That's right ... with education, giving it to them in spoonful pieces, and letting them go at their own pace.

But you mentioned agents and agentic. It's changing the world. Not just training, not just security, it's changing the world.

How is it changing the security and security training world? It's a great question, and the first thing I'd say to you is we're working from a really strong base, and you said it. When it comes to awareness and training, we're the leader by a country mile.

Mm-hmm. And have been. People trust us.

They know us. Our stat is one in four knowledge workers in the US have been trained by KnowBe4. KnowBe4.

Pretty big. But what we've done is we now look at our business really in three pillars. Attack simulation and training, which is a lot of what we're known for.

Although it includes compliance management, broader than cybersecurity, it also includes real-time coaching, which you mentioned. Mm-hmm. Really getting people in the moment, right?

That's really a new way of operating, to your point, very different than the old classroom or even an old video, or- Sure ... so we use that as well. The second pillar is collaboration security.

We got into the cloud email security business about 18 months ago when we bought the egress business. We've tripled the size of that business. Wow.

Inbound and outbound email. We have a great partnership with Microsoft. So that's our second pillar.

We also do security for Teams and Slack- Mm-hmm ... which is important as well. And then the third one you just mentioned is the agentic risk management.

So we're now saying, "Hey-"You're going to have a workforce, and that workforce is going to be a combo of humans and agents. And guess what? KnowBe4 is going to be there for you.

We're going to be there to help you protect your organization. We're going to be there to help you put guardrails and policy around what can humans do, what can agents do, and most importantly, we're going to be there to create both humans and agents into assets versus vulnerabilities. Absolutely.

That's who we are. That's what we're doing. We're pretty fired up about it.

I love it. Yeah. I love the passion too.

Yeah. It's great. I tell people this all the time.

Yep. So here's the deal, though, with AI agents. It's like a sword and a shield, right?

Yeah. The bad guys are using- That's right ... the bad guys aren't stupid.

You know this from your childhood- For sure ... days, I'm sure. They're well-financed, well-organized, and not dummies.

That's right. How do you prepare people to fight that battle? Yeah.

Well, the first thing you got to do is you got to educate them, and that, as we know, is something that's overlooked, right? You got to make sure they're aware. So one of the things our agent risk management product does, the first thing it does is give you an inventory.

What's going on? " Mm-hmm. Who in my organization is even using an agent?

Yeah. And is it an approved agent, or are they using shadow AI, which we know- Yeah ... is like shadow IT.

Yeah, it's- People are just going out to an LLM. They're signing up for it themselves. Everyone is.

And they're putting data in, right? Absolutely. So our technology allows you to do an inventory.

The second thing it does is says, "Okay, great. What are those agents doing? What tools are they connected to?

Is it connected to Salesforce? Is it connected to Jira? Is it connected to," you know, you name the system, Workday.

What can it do, because where's it connected? We map that for people, and then we say, "Okay, what protocols do you want to put around this? " For example, we have a couple different agentic applications we're using.

I can only use it if I'm on VPN. If I'm not on VPN, I can't use it. Right.

Right. So there's ways to configure that. You can warn them, you can prevent them.

So that's what our agent technology is focused on, which is fun, right? Now, but this is fundamentally a leap forward- Right ... from just awareness and training people.

That's right. You're now proactively providing the security that we need- That's right ... in an agentic world.

That's right. We're doing it two things. We're providing it.

What I told you about is specifically helping protect those agents. The other thing we're doing is our platform's fully agentic. Yes.

So what that means is I can now go to KnowBe4, go to my platform, create AI training, create AI quizzes, tests, whatever I want to do, collateral. And we just announced here our partnership with Synthesia, who's the leader in AI video creation. So now you can go to our platform, use Synthesia's technology, and create AI videos yourself because you can leverage what we've done, which hundreds of millions of people have seen.

" Real quick. "I want to have Alan on my video. He's in my company," and you can go use AI to do that, right?

Yeah. So, that's the other piece. And the final piece is we are, like everybody else, are using agents in the company to run finance, to help run customer success, to help us in go-to-market.

And my last count coming before here, we have 400 agents right now. Really? So we have 2,400 employees and 400 agents.

Six to one ratio already. And I think by the end of the year, we'll have 1,000. I was just going to ask you that.

Over 1,000 agents. Do you think it flips 10 to one? Yeah.

Probably not by the end of the year we'll get even, but I think by the end of the year, we'll be at 1,000. It'll be two to one. That's my- It's crazy.

It's crazy. It's fast. When they told me, "Hey, we got 400, boss," I was like, "Well, that's good.

That's good. We're doing the right thing," right? Look, my company's much smaller, but we're similar.

Similar. We've got everyone just- On it ... I've told them, "Just use it.

" Yeah, exactly. " Same. " That's right.

I was just with our top developer. " No, it's all good. "You're leading the charge.

Go do it," right? I don't want him thinking, worrying about it. No.

The top guy, I mean. Look, we've seen technology trends come and go. Remember when FinOps first came out for cloud?

Yeah. First, people were running cloud- Yes ... and then someone said, "Wait a second.

" Not yet, no. " My one, you and Joe remember, too, that I always use is servers, right? Sure.

Servers got so cheap, everybody went and filled their data center with servers, and then they woke up one day and went, "Oh, every server is 20% utilized. " And then someone came in VM to create how do we get more usage out of it? Yeah.

To your point, we're in that early phase. We're more dense. Absolutely.

We're not efficient yet. I'll tell you a story. So back in the dot com days- Yeah ...

I don't know if you remember something called Cobalt servers. Yeah. They were the one used servers that lit up red lights.

Right. Well, I'll talk to you about it offline. We'll talk about it offline.

Sounds good. But yes, there was a lot of servers spent in those days. Absolutely.

" Yeah. Is it an extension of today, or is there something else on the horizon? Yeah.

Look, I think there's a couple things that you should anticipate. One, it'll be our decade anniversary, so we're going to blow it out, right? 10 years.

10 years. The company will, at that point, have been around 16 years, but 10 years of KB4 Con, so it's going to be a big event. We already know it's going to be here in Orlando.

Great. So we're looking to grow. We're looking to bring everybody in.

I think the other thing we're looking to do is make sure we're streaming everything. We have a lot of customers that are so important to us, but they can't afford to get here. We want to make sure they're getting the content real time and live, so we'll be streaming it.

I think you're going to see a lot more in the next year. You're really going to seeOur agent risk management take off. We have hundreds of people that have signed up in the labs to help us with our early adopter program.

Great. I think by next year, it's going to be one of our leading products, which is exciting, and I think you're going to see KnowBe4 Studios do a lot more. One of the things I always said is we're the best in security when it comes to what you said, entertainment around security training.

Well, I don't want to be the best in security. I want to be the best in entertainment. I want to be as good as TikTok, as good as the platforms that people want to go to.

So you're going to see us really infuse that element across everything we do. KnowBe4 Studios is a key asset for us. I love it.

We mentioned a few things here. I wanted to make sure people can follow it. Sure.

KnowBe4 Studios, where do they go for that? Yeah. KnowBe4 Studios, go right online with us.

Everything we produce content-wise is available. Some of it's available through PSAs, public service announcements. Mm-hmm.

Other content's available through our home kit, and of course, all our content's available through our subscriptions. Brian, you've been in the security business a long time. Yeah.

As long as I have. Yeah. This whole AI thing has fundamentally changed- Yeah ...

whether we're talking about Mythos and vulnerabilities- Yep ... AppSec, and all of these things. Has the mission changed?

I don't think so. Look, I do think what's happening in this agentic era, I'm sure you have done it, too, debated with friends and people way smarter than me, and a couple of people I know say, "Look, this is bigger than the Industrial Revolution. " It's just amazing how big it is.

But I think at the same time, for us, and your audience, that's in the cybersecurity business, like you said, the adversaries and the good guys, it's always been a cat and mouse game. And there's always been developments that happen, and the bad guys go figure out a way to do something, and the good guys got to counteract it. Yep.

And sometimes they leapfrog us, and sometimes we leapfrog them. I think what's fundamentally different about this is the speed at which it's happening. Yeah.

We're not talking about- The speed and the scale ... months. We're not talking about years.

We're not... Yeah, the scale as well, but we're talking days. We're talking weeks.

Yeah. So I think the speed is what's different, but as far as the cat and mouse game, it's still happening. It's the same cat and mouse.

It may play out in a week, though, versus six months. Or a day, or hours. Exactly.

It's a nuts thing. And again, as I said, the scale of it. But I don't think there's any fundamental difference in there's new tech available.

Bad guys are using it to do bad things. Good guys are trying to stop them and using it. That's the way it's always been.

Right. The way it's always been. Totally agree.

Hey, man. First of all, I want to thank you for having us out here. Thanks for being here.

Secondly, congratulations. Thank you. You could feel it here, the difference.

Yeah. That this is no longer fundamentally about security awareness. That's right.

This is about really securing the organization and the individual- That's right ... in a new world. That's right.

A world- That's what we're here to do. Look, we are one of the leaders. One of the things I don't think people know about us, we have 70,000 customers.

Wow. 9 billion of ARR. We have a lot less than that.

So we feel like we're in a good place. We feel like we make a big impact in the market. 9.

I love it. We'll go. That'd be good.

We'll do that. Thanks, Alan. Good to see you.

Bryan Palma, CEO of KnowBe4 here on Techstrong TV. Hey, we're going to take a break. I hope you've enjoyed this.

If you haven't caught any of our other KnowBe4 segments from here today, go check them out. There's some amazing interviews in there. We've got more coming up, but I'm glad if you started here with Brian's, it's a good place to start.

We're going to be back. I'm Alan Shimel.