Yinon Costica, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Wiz: Wiz’s AI agents protect companies from cyber attacks around the clock

Sebastian Johnson (0:00)

Hello, welcome back to Scaling Europe show. Today on the show, we've got an amazing guest, Yinon, co-founder, VP of product at Wiz. Phenomenal company, one of the most incredible stories of the last five or six years. Thank you for joining me. How are you doing today?

Yinon Costica (0:11)

Hi, Seb, thank you for having me. I'm doing well.

Sebastian Johnson (0:14)

It is my absolute pleasure. I want to get into it, and the first question I want to ask is about the similarities of the time that we're living in right now with AI, to sort of the moment that Wiz was founded in with this move to cloud. Five or six years ago, Wiz saw this explosive growth as companies were rushing to get onto the cloud and it presented an amazing opportunity for you and the team to be the cloud security platform for those companies.

Are you seeing parallels with that movement and that moment to cloud today with AI?

Yinon Costica (0:45)

Absolutely. Actually, I'm super happy you started with this question because this is really how I feel in many cases where I'm looking at questions on how the AI market evolve, what will happen. So, I actually take a step back, I try to remember what were the dynamic back in the cloud days, and that's how I try to really project a bit the trends. I think that there are many similarities in a way of how do we adopt a new technology? How do we actually think about transformation?

Recently, I was thinking about the similarities when cloud started, everybody were on this journey of selecting the one cloud they will. Today, nobody lives in a single cloud, everybody is multi-cloud, and I see it's striking similarity to how AI is being consumed. It's not going to be about a single model or a single AI provider, we're going to need to have a variety for diversity of thought, diversity of intelligence applied in our organization. So, a lot of similarities also in terms of the economics, how do we consume the need to drive not only premium products, but also accessible, affordable products at scale. So, a lot of similarities indeed. One, maybe two differences that are key to understand. One is the speed of transformation, nothing to compare. In cloud, we had maybe a decade to ingest, think, decide how to do it, how to do it right. We had a lot of time. In AI, it seems like we're really compressing a decade into less than a year, in the transformation and acceleration of the development of the technology. The second thing relates to cybersecurity. I think that cloud wasn't a key accelerator for the threat actors. It was yet another attack surface. I think that AI, when we look at it from a cyber security perspective, it is an accelerator for the AI threat landscape, and a lot of what we see today in cyber is driven by the application of AI, both on the offensive side and defensive side.

These are two big differences.

Sebastian Johnson (3:08)

Those big differences are pretty stark, in the sense that you've got compressed timelines, people are panicking to get to adopt this technology, and you've got the fact that it's an increased risk factor.

What does that mean for your stakeholders? Are you seeing a lot of anxiety and urgency among customers? And then I also want to ask, how does that impact the way that you're building? So let's start with the stakeholders and the customers. What's going through their minds? How are they reacting and behaving?

Yinon Costica (3:33)

Absolutely, I think it changes everything. It changes, first, it's really important to understand that it doesn't matter whether an organization chooses to use AI or not. The threat landscape has changed. Attackers will use AI. So by definition, we have to think about securing against an AI-powered attacker, regardless of whether we're using AI or not in the org. So it's not our decision. And I think that this is an understanding that is driving a lot of the adoption of AI technologies for security, because we understand that if we now have to face an AI-powered attacker, we have to set up AI-powered defenses. And I think this is maybe every stakeholder really undersends it. And I think that more than this, we have a lot of examples out in the news, in the market that are very concrete examples that help us to really structure and put a framework on how we think about the new landscape and what we should prepare for.

So I think that's definitely on the stakeholder side. I will say that cyber today is in a state of, I would say, very high maturity when it comes to acknowledging the risks and the need to invest in cybersecurity. This has not been the case a decade ago or even five years ago. And I think that this maturity in the cyber industry really helps to drive the right discussions that are discussions of how do we enable AI, but at the same time, how do we secure ourselves, and how do we do effectively secure ourselves? And these are the right discussions to have. So that's on the stakeholder side. On the how we develop, it changed completely how we operate. It changed completely how we think about the products that we need to build, right? First, internally, we are leveraging AI across every single team. It's like we have to transform, whether it's a development team, the product team, the research teams. Everything is now driven by AI because it's an amazing, amazing unlock of productivity and intelligence that we can harness.