Sara Aiello on KnowBe4’s Growth, Strategy and KB4-CON Evolution | KB4-CON 2026

Hey everyone, we're back here at KB4Con in Orlando. It's rocking. I don't know if you could hear the music, but it's rocking here.

Sure. But it's more than the music, the buzz, the excitement, the vitality of the audience, of the show, and what's going on here is really coming through. A lot of it is thanks to the work of this lady and her team.

I want to introduce you to Sarah Aiello, who heads up marketing at KnowBe4. Sarah, welcome. Thank you so much.

Great to have you here. It's a great show. It sure is.

Look at this. Did you cue them to shut the music down? I mean, they're going to shut down in a second, I am going to say.

" No. No. Hey, we need a little vibe, though.

We have 2,000 of our close friends here. It is a great show. We're really excited.

A big team behind the scenes put this together. Absolutely. I was talking to Brian earlier.

Yeah. Oh, we got the chimes back. Yeah.

There's a 40% increase over last year- It is ... which is huge. I should never correct my CEO, but it is 44% increase year over year.

All right. Give him a beggar. We'll give him a little leeway.

Yeah. But that's quite a jump. It is.

What do you attest that to? Yeah, I think this year, we're really intentional. This is our premier user conference, but we also wanted to bring everyone else along the journey, our partners.

We have a whole analyst track. We brought a whole bunch of students from local universities in. We, of course, back in the labs, have our exhibitors, those that are in our tech alliance program.

We just wanted to grow it and just make a really great event for everyone who contributes to the KnowBe4 ecosystem. Love it. If you don't mind, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about KnowBe4 and the mission.

Yeah. Look, I've been in security 30 years. I know KnowBe4 a long time.

Yeah. Acknowledged leader in security awareness training. Yeah.

I always call it human is the weakest link in the chain training, if you will. Yeah. But the world's changed, and KnowBe4's changed with it.

Yeah. I spoke to Brian and Marco? Yeah.

As chief strategy or SVP strategy. Yeah. You've taken on a little bit of, he calls it adjacent- Mm-hmm ...

to your existing mission. Yeah. Which is kind of defending the agentic workforce, the digital workforce.

Right. I've been in enough startups and companies- Yeah ... " It's such a natural mission for us to evolve to.

So KnowBe4, been in business 15 years. No one knows human behavior better than us. But world has changed.

The workforce is humans and agents, and we have to protect, secure, train both of them. And so naturally, we've set ourself up because of our longevity of being a company, that data we've had of user behaviors, threat intelligence layered over it, there's no one better to expand that to agents. Humans get socially engineered, agents get prompt injected, humans fill in gaps with stories, agents fill in gaps with hallucinations.

So it's very similar, and we know how to do it all. So let's take that leap and really wasn't a big leap for us. It's natural.

So here's an interesting take on it, though. Part of this move is protecting the digital workforce. Mm-hmm.

They're agents. Let's call them what they are. Yeah.

They're agents. They're not people. Yeah.

You don't market to them. No. You've got to market to the people who are running them.

That's right. What's the right... Don't give away any trade secrets.

But what's the right messaging for that? Yeah. How do you let people know, hey, your digital workforce, the same way you've been training and protecting your humans- Mm-hmm ...

you now need to protect your digital workforce. Yeah. At the end of the day, I think, you say secret sauce.

Marketing doesn't really have a secret sauce because we are humans. We have emotions. You have to tap into that.

You have to use simple words, things that everyone can understand. Now we just have to extend that to agents. To me, it's pretty simple.

The ones who will do really well in it are the ones who can take complex things and make it understandable to not just people in the industry, but all of our end users for us. 70,000 customers across the globe, they aren't all in tech. We have a customer who does roller coasters.

We have a customer who makes coffee drinks, and so they're baristas we have to be able to have a connection with. Sure. So everyone and anyone.

Tomorrow, we actually have an announcement that's coming out, and it is about our cybersecurity awareness program, free access for family-friendly training, training for elders who didn't grow up using technology, and so we're putting that out there because we have to be able to address everyone. Well, the good news is we didn't record this live. By the time people see it, it'll be out.

I was figuring that, so Yeah. Otherwise, I would've had to cut you off, because then we have to edit. But that's an amazing thing.

Look, unfortunately, I've been the IT support person in my extended family- Yeah ... for my entire career. I hate it.

I feel you. Every time someone's internet doesn't work, or they think they've been hacked- Yeah ... or something- Yeah ...

I get a call, and I do diagnosis over the phone. Absolutely. I think all of us in tech are that.

All of us in IT become that, yeah. But it's even more than that because it's just, what do you do in your day to day? Social media is out there.

Yeah. How do people interact with that? That isn't always a technical problem.

No. But it's something people have to learn and know how to do. But the game has changed, right?

Because it used to be very easy to see that that phishing email came from someone who's writing English as a second language. Yeah. And it was- Not anymore ...

sloppy. And I'm on the lookout for it. And not only is it an email, we have multi-channel attacks where they're going to text you, they're going to email you, they're going to get you on the phone.

That is complex, and people are not fooled by it. They're just tapping into how people naturally do their life. Well, no, but the good ones.

Mm-hmm. They pull at your emotions. Yeah.

They elicit some emotional, like a touch button. Yeah. They push that button that makes you just want to act without really- They have all the right things.

Usually a sense of urgency is in there. Yeah. They're going to make you want to take that action.

It is what it is. Yeah. " Mm-hmm.

To market for an AI savvy world, you got to use AI, too. Certainly. Let's talk about how eating your own dog food, drinking your own champagne, whatever you want to call it.

Listen, I've been in this marketing world for a long time. I've never been more excited because the efficiency and the ability to do things that used to just be a lot of time for my schedule, I can now do with AI. So Know Before, we have over 400 agents that we use internally.

My team, I'm using Claude on the daily. Claude Cowork has changed my life. Absolutely.

I am just really excited for some of the design work to get a little bit better in the AI models. Probably will be in a couple of weeks at this rate. Or days.

Exactly. The last ChatGPT graphic one is amazing. Yeah.

I'm not endorsing anyone here, but- Me neither ... we also use Perplexity Computer, which has them all plugged in on the back. Yeah.

I have redesigned most of our webs... Me, personally- Yeah ... have redesigned most of our websites.

Yeah. That's amazing. And now I zip it up as a WordPress and give it to the- Yeah ...

web engineer. Yeah. Or designer.

I know. " Yeah. And we're relaunch-- It's...

I know. And how cool is that for us? Take your tool of choice.

Even Gems, Gemini, we put all of our customer testimonials into it. And so when we need a quote or something, we can just No more having to type. No, really.

All kidding aside, it's an amazing time- It is so great ... to be working in this right now. Yeah.

Now, of course, there are people out there who either they have trouble breathing when they hear this, right? It's true. Because they're threatened.

Yeah. There's a- What's your advice to them? Everyone has a tolerance level.

There has to be a comfortability level. But I would say that's why the work we're doing at Know Before is so important. We're going to protect those agents.

We're going to make sure that they're behaving as they should. We're going to make sure there isn't runaway consumption, so it's not going to drive up costs for organizations that want to use the AI. So I would say, just like you're the tech support for your family, find someone that's out there that knows AI, get comfortable with it, because it's not going away.

No, it's not. And that's also great advice. I know a lot of people, friends, children, and- Yeah ...

my children's friends who went to school for marketing- Yeah ... communications, and so forth, and they're worried. They're worried sick, right?

Yeah. About what is this going to mean for their career. Yeah.

And I encourage them, embrace this. That's what I say. " No.

People who don't learn AI may not have a job, right? So to your point, embrace it, roll with it. The job may look a little different, but there's definitely always going to be jobs for humans.

Especially in the marketing space, some of the tools, they sound generic. It's the Sia same. You need that human to be creative, to be able to bring that to the table.

That's never going away, in my opinion. Great. Last thing.

Just between you and I, what else might we expect to see come out of the Know Before marketing team? Hmm. Let's see.

One thing that should be no surprise is that we will be back for our 10th year kBefore Con next April. So I know it's hard to wait a whole what, 11 months, but we will be back planning that. So you're moving it to April like it was last year- That's right ...

versus May. That's right. A little bird told me it might be here in Orlando again.

I think that little bird is correct. It may actually be in the same place that you are right now. Yeah.

It was a big bird to tell you. Yeah. He's wearing a white shirt.

I think I know which one that is. Yeah. He's pretty tall.

Oh, he's a tall guy. Yeah. That's interesting.

I've been coming to this facility since they opened. Yeah. It's a great place to do conferences.

It's great. We love it. Everything is kind of close together.

It can hold our size and expand with us. Yes, we grew 44%, but next year we're going to be much bigger. I hope so.

That would be great. Yeah. But that's a whole year away.

Mm-hmm. Anything else coming up? For instance, Brian said, "Hey, we're probably going to move from 400 to 1,000 agents- Yeah ...

" I have no doubt. I'd actually be surprised if it's by the end of the year. I think for me on the marketing front, one thing that I really want to work on is we have all of this great content that goes into our training platform.

Let's pull out what we can from it and make it available to everyone. Because this day and age, with the change of AI, everything else that's going on, we all need to get smarter. I'm going to end it right there.

We all need to get smarter. Excellent advice. Thank you so much, Sarah.

Thank you so much. We're going to take a break. We've got more coming to...

The music died, but we've got more coming. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.