Snyk's Manoj Nair: Skills and MCP Are the New npm

Manoj Nair (0:00)

Someone said Minthos basically was a margin call on your technical debt. And last week, I was with a, you know, like 100 plus CISOs in New York, and people are now starting because of this, like, you know, real notion that there is an autonomous attacker out there. Lots of attacks have happened. Speed has increased, security has not kept up. We've seen 10X increase year over year on the backlog. And for every issue that is being fixed, eight new issues are being created.

Simon Maple (0:30)

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Guy Podjarny (1:50)

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the AI Native Dev. I'm Guy Podjarny and we're here in the Snyk AI Security Summit, or the Snyk-backed AI Security Summit, with Manoj Nair, who is heading product innovation marketing. I forget now the title, but he's a key product leader in Snyk. Manoj, thanks for joining the podcast.

Manoj Nair (2:08)

Thanks for having me, Guy.

Guy Podjarny (2:10)

A really fun event here today, various companies of various stages. But I figured what we should talk about today, mostly also relevant to the AI Native Dev audience, is to talk about the enterprise and the state of AI in the enterprise and agent adoption. Because I feel oftentimes in this podcast and in general, maybe like the hype of the era, we get drawn and we dig into this incredible futures on it, and enterprises have certain burdens, a lot of urgency to move, but certain burdens that prevent them from doing it. I think Snyk is in a really, really good point of view on it, working with some very moderns. I guess just to kick it off, what is it that you would say is the current state of enterprise adoptions as you're seeing it? Then we'll dig a little bit into why are the ones that are behind, what's holding them back, and the ones that are ahead, how are they getting there?

Manoj Nair (3:16)

It's a really good question. First of all, thanks for having me here and thanks for being a sponsor of AI Security Summit. So it's become a really good collection of people talking about security and AI. A year ago, no one was really cared. Now, that seems to be the biggest topic. So it's been a really good turnout and good to be here.

Guy Podjarny (3:36)

I find that just as a bit of a side note, it's like when I founded Snyk many, many years ago, I debated whether to come back to security because I was saying on how you go to a security event and you come back and you want to cry in a corner, like curl up in a corner and cry as just like the world is doomed, there's so much problem and you're going to a DevOps conference and it's all singing Kumbaya and the web is amazing and we can build these great things on it.

So I think in the world of AI, it's just the odd combination of both. It's like you have these conversations about these incredible things you do in building and in security, all these things that AI unlocks, and there's definitely a lot of doom. There's definitely a lot of the world is collapsing on us, agentic attackers, what can we do on it? So it's just a little bit interesting.

Manoj Nair (4:24)

I'll start there. I hope we had the healthy dose of optimism too from all the speakers. A lot of both.

Guy Podjarny (4:30)

Yeah.

Manoj Nair (4:31)

But I liked how an enterprise customer recently classified it, and I'll give you a little bit going back to the first question. AI is definitely an attacker now.