Elia Zaitsev says most software companies exist for one purpose: to make their customers happy. But what he finds most thrilling about his 12-year career at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is that it has to please clients, while also making the bad actors it fights against unhappy.

“There’s a determined adversary on the other side of the table who’s doing everything they can, with significant resources and time and expertise, to circumvent everything that’s being developed,” says Zaitsev, CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer.

Those adversaries—espionage attacks that have increased from nations like China and Iran, as well as new generative artificial intelligence-driven phishing and impersonation tactics—have propelled a sharp increase in malware-free, identity-based attacks. And as businesses migrate more workloads to the cloud, those environments have also become a more frequent target too, with new and unattributed intrusions increasing 26% last year from 2023.

Rather than look for a vulnerability on an external server, these nefarious individuals and organizations are using generative AI and other tools to develop convincing text, audio, and video to infiltrate systems. What that means is that fraudulent emails coming from a company’s “help desk” asking for a password are now often more polished than prior attempts that were often riddled with easy-to-spot mistakes.

The cautionary tale on the lips of every cyber expert, including Zaitsev, is an incident last year in which a finance worker in Hong Kong was scammed out of $25 million after fraudsters used a deepfake to pose as a chief financial officer during a video conference call.

“They’re relying on the weakest link, often in defenses, which is the human,” says Zaitsev.

These evolving tactics are why CrowdStrike reports that the average breakout time for an intrusion—the moment an adversary is able to move laterally throughout a company’s system after initially gaining access—has dropped to 48 minutes in 2024 from 62 minutes the prior year. The fastest breakout CrowdStrike reported was just 51 seconds, giving defenders less than a minute to detect and respond to an attack. 

CrowdStrike has bulked up its cyber defenses through a series of acquisitions, including Preempt Security and SecureCircle, a cybersecurity provider that requires identity verification for every access request, regardless of location.

CrowdStrike has also invested in new product development, including this week’s debut of new Charlotte AI’s agentic capabilities, which asks and answers investigative questions, helping to streamline cyber attack analysis and give security experts more time to act.

Charlotte AI’s accuracy rate is over 98%, according to Zaitsev, meaning that the generative AI tool comes to the same conclusion as human analysts 98 times out of 100 when assessing either a true positive or false positive attack. But humans can take about five minutes, on average, to perform this triage versus seconds Charlotte AI. That can save average enterprise customers up to 40 hours of human labor, per week.

Zaitsev says even as these generative AI-enabled defenses advance, he doesn’t see them replacing humans. Because even with the high effectiveness rate, many customers will continue to want their workforces to remain accountable to ensure cyber safety. “We’re short on humans,” says Zaitsev. “What we want to do is augment them, make them more and more efficient, and also use them as the guardrail, as the check and balance.”

Zaitsev was an early employee at CrowdStrike, joining as its first sales engineer in 2013 and rising up the ranks over a decade. He became acquainted with CrowdStrike CEO and founder George Kurtz and other executives when they were at security software company McAfee for a partnership with Zaitsev’s former employer i2, which provides visual investigative analysis software for governments and law enforcement.

He was elevated to the role of CTO in 2023, after running technology for the Americas business for nearly three years, following the promotion of his predecessor Michael Sentonas, who is now president.

“I always ground myself in and use that customer-facing perspective to try and understand not only what is the competition doing, but what are the customers looking to do,” says Zaitsev. He remains hands-on and technical—never a programmer, but having been a coder for decades—enabling Zaitsev to build trust with CrowdStrike’s engineering team.

Externally, trust in CrowdStrike eroded last summer, when a global IT outage due to a faulty software update crashed millions of Windows-based devices, stinging airlines, banks, retailers, and other customers, while costing Fortune 500 companies billions in damages. “The July incident was very painful for them and for us,” acknowledges Zaitsev.

CrowdStrike, he says, learned valuable lessons from the experience and incorporated customer feedback to bolster controls and capabilities to prevent another outage. The company also offered incentives for a time to keep enterprises from defecting to competitors. CrowdStrike’s financial results following the incident remained resilient. Total and subscription revenue—the latter generally a one-to-three-year commitment—each increased 36% in fiscal 2024 from the prior year. The stock has recovered from a sharp selloff in July.

“I think we have come out of this, frankly, stronger,” says Zaitsev.

John Kell

Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.

NEWS PACKETS

Intel confirms layoffs plans—but doesn’t say how many jobs will be impacted. Struggling chipmaker Intel, which has been eclipsed by rival Nvidia’s dominant position in the AI chip maker, last week confirmed it would trim jobs. New CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees in a note the company was “too slow, too complex and too set in our ways—and we need to change.” Intel didn’t confirm how many jobs would be eliminated, though Bloomberg reported it will be more than 20% of all staff. While Intel’s woes are specific to itself, layoffs in tech have become more common in recent years, with more than 50,000 tech workers from over 100 companies laid off thus far in 2025, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing data from the job cuts tracking website Layoffs.fyi. Companies are still cutting staffing levels after too much hiring during the pandemic, but efforts to more closely monitor employee productivity and shifting more dollars to AI are also factors.

IBM to invest $150 billion in the U.S. The tech giant unveiled a multibillion-dollar spending commitment over the next five years, including more than $30 billion earmarked for research and development to advance and continue the company’s U.S. manufacturing of mainframe and quantum computing. There’s been rising interest in quantum computing—Google is another bull, unveiling a quantum chip late last year and joining with SoftBank and others in February to invest in quantum startup QuEra. But Reuters reports the jury is still out on when quantum computing will have tangible real-world applications and pegs the latest announcement as more intended to win favor with President Donald Trump and his administration’s efforts to push for more domestic manufacturing.

China’s Huawei aims at Nvidia with a new AI chip. Huawei Technologies is reportedly in the early stages of developing its newest and most powerful AI processor, which it hopes will replace some higher-end offerings from Nvidia, the Wall Street Journal reports. Citing people familiar with the matter, the outlet said Huawei has approached some Chinese companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip, called the Ascend 910D. It hopes this chip will be more powerful than Nvidia’s H100, which was released in 2022 and, since late that year, banned by the U.S. from export to Chinese companies.

Elon Musk’s XAI Holdings in talks to raise $20 billion. The startup created in March to combine social media platform X with Musk’s AI venture, xAI, is reportedly talking to investors about a deal that would be the second-largest ever startup investment round. It would only trail OpenAI’s $40 billion in new funding, announced earlier this year. Bloomberg reports the new funding could be used to pay down some debt Musk took on when he converted Twitter (now X) to a private company, citing a person familiar with the matter. When given the opportunity, investors have clamored to invest in AI startups—including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral AI—putting nearly 36% of global venture capital funding into AI and machine learning startups in 2024.

ADOPTION CURVE

AI agents are among the hottest tech products. But companies deploying them cite complications and major apprehension. 

In a new survey, enterprise IT leaders said the top difficulties in adopting agents are data privacy concerns (53%), challenges integrating them with existing systems (40%), and high implementation costs (39%). 

The survey by software provider Cloudera is based on responses from 1,484 individuals. 

A majority (57%) say they have at least started to implement AI agents within the past two years while 96% say they plan to expand their use of agentic AI within the next 12 months. While still early days, IT leaders already want more from their vendors with 65% expecting to see stronger data privacy and security features, while 54% want faster training and customization. 

The survey also dove into the popularity of AI agent use cases by industry. For finance and insurance, the top use was fraud detection (56%) while for the healthcare sector it was appointment scheduling (51%). Customer support and service bots ranked first for telecommunications companies (49%) and retailers (50%), and manufacturing’s greatest focus is on supply chain optimization (49%).

[caption id="attachment_4214515" align="aligncenter" width="2092"] Courtesy of Cloudera[/caption]

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- Workshop Venture Partners is seeking a CTO, based in Boston. Posted salary range: $160K-$220K/year.

- Hasbro is seeking a VP, go-to-market technology, based in Pawtucket, RI. Posted salary range: $225.6K-$338.4K/year.

- BrandSafway is seeking a director of IT applications, people technology, based in Atlanta. Posted salary range: $200K-$230K/year.

- Walmart is seeking a personalization director for e-commerce technology operations, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. 

Hired:

- Kaiser Permanente has named Neil Cowles as the healthcare giant’s chief information and technology officer, overseeing the IT organization. Since June 2024, Cowles was CTO and first joined Kaiser Permanente in 2012 as an executive director. He began his career as a clinically trained health care professional in the U.K. and Australia and has held IT leadership roles at several companies, including software provider Oracle.

- Hiscox London Market announced Phil Withey as CTO of the U.K.-based insurer, after previously spending a decade at financial infrastructure and data provider London Stock Exchange Group, where he held a number of senior technology positions. Withey will join Hiscox in June and be responsible for London Market’s tech strategy, including investments in data, digital, and AI.

- Appgate announced Nitin Pillai as CTO, following Kurt Glazemakers' transition after 11 years in that role to a strategic advisor. Prior to joining the cybersecurity company, Pillai was VP of engineering for Blackbird.AI, which sells risk management tools. He also spent a decade at Microsoft and was previously director of engineering at data analytics startup Dataminr.

- Imprivata promoted Joel Burleson-Davis to the role of CTO, after most recently serving as SVP of engineering for cybersecurity and data science at the digital identity security provider. Prior to joining Imprivata in 2022, Burleson-Davis was CTO at SecureLink, which Imprivata acquired three years ago. 

- ESO appointed John Basmadjian as chief product and technology officer, joining the data and software company after most recently serving as CTO and chief product officer at energy management provider COI Energy. Basmadjian was also previously senior director of engineering for Google Fitbit, and held leadership roles at energy giant Shell and software provider Workday.

- Arcwood Environmental announced Jeana Thomas as chief digital and information officer, joining the environmental services provider. She joins from agricultural giant Cargill, where Thomas was VP and CIO of the animal health and nutrition business. Thomas was also CIO for aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.

- NewHydrogen named Eric McFarland as CTO, where he will spearhead the development and commercialization of clean energy technologies. McFarland will continue to work with the scientific teams at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was previously a founding director of chemical technology startup Symyx Technologies and CEO of Gas Reaction Technologies.