Appoints Harlan Parrott to lead the organization’s AI Center of Excellence
KnowBe4, the world-renowned platform that comprehensively addresses human and agentic AI risk management, today celebrates a decade of pioneering Artificial Intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the beta version of AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents); a milestone that reinforces KnowBe4’s position training humans and agents, and as the only agentic provider in the industry.
With the appointment of Harlan Parrott as VP of AI Innovation, KnowBe4 is doubling down on its ‘AI-first’ mission. Tasked with leading the AI Center of Excellence, Parrott will oversee the expansion of AI capabilities within its internal operations and the company’s product suite.
Building on 15 years of user behavior and threat intelligence data, the organization began exploring AI capabilities as early as 2016. By combining phishing, vishing, and smishing into multi-faceted, AI-simulated social engineering attacks, KnowBe4 protected users from complex threats long before AI became a cornerstone of cybersecurity. Today, the company offers seven specialized agents that have been proven in-market for more than a year to automate Human Risk Management (HRM), a solution trusted by more than 70,000 customers.
KnowBe4’s AIDA is used to create custom phishing templates based on current attack vectors, generate quizzes based on organizations’ specific security and compliance policies, automate remedial training for employees who need more support, create customized deepfakes, and much more.
"At KnowBe4, we’ve shaped the future of AI-driven risk management to deliver smarter, faster and more effective human risk management," said Greg Kras, chief product officer at KnowBe4. "While others are just beginning to explore the potential of AI, we are celebrating ten years of in-market proven innovation. With seven agents already available, and more on the way, we are enabling security teams to move away from manual administration and focus on strategic risk decisions that truly move the needle."
Recognizing AI as a transformative force in the cybersecurity landscape, KnowBe4 is focused on embedding cutting-edge AI solutions into its operations as well as its offerings. The enhanced AI Center of Excellence, led by Parrott, will focus on empowering teams to build and use innovative AI solutions, improving internal efficiency and product development.
“The intersection of AI and cybersecurity is the most critical challenge in our industry today,” said Parrott. “I look forward to developing KnowBe4’s use of AI as we commit to embedding advanced solutions across the organization; from accelerating our operations to developing new, powerful defenses against the next generation of AI-driven threats.”
Parrott brings more than 20 years of experience building SaaS and cloud platforms, offering a uniquely operational perspective to the potential of AI.
“Harlan’s appointment marks a key milestone for KnowBe4 as we enhance our commitment to Artificial Intelligence,” said Bryan Palma, CEO at KnowBe4. “His deep expertise in machine learning and cybersecurity are precisely what is needed to lead our AI Center of Excellence. Harlan’s vision will be instrumental in leading the next frontier of AI across our organization.”
For more information on KnowBe4 and AIDA, visit https://www.knowbe4.com/products/aida.
About KnowBe4
KnowBe4 empowers workforces to make smarter security decisions every day. Trusted by more than 70,000 organizations worldwide, KnowBe4 builds security culture and helps teams manage both human and agent risk. The company delivers a comprehensive, agentic best-of-suite platform for Human Risk Management, creating an adaptive defense layer that reinforces secure behavior against evolving cybersecurity threats. The HRM+ platform includes awareness training, integrated cloud email security, real-time coaching, crowdsourced anti-phishing, AI Defense Agents, and more. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in business operations, KnowBe4 prepares the modern workforce by training both humans and AI agents to recognize and respond to security risks. Through this unified approach, KnowBe4 leads workforce trust management and defense strategies. More info at knowbe4.com.
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FAQs:
Q: What is AIDA?
AIDA is a suite of AI Agents for human risk management that continuously automates SAT administration and content personalization so security teams can focus on strategic risk decisions rather than operational tasks.
Q: What AI agents are currently available from KnowBe4?
KnowBe4 currently offers the following AI Agents:
- Remedial Training Agent
- Template Generation Agent
- Callback Template Generation Agent
- Knowledge Refresher Agent
- Policy Quiz Agent
- Recommended Landing Pages Agent
- Deepfake Training Content Agent
Q: What are the benefits of AIDA?
- Save time: AIDA reduces the time required to create personalized training and phishing simulations from hours to mere seconds.
- Industry alignment: By aligning with the NIST Phish Scale Framework, AIDA ensures training consistency with broader organizational security initiatives.
- Unified teams: Personalized, relevant training reduces friction between security departments and employees, building a culture of trust.
- Strategic budgeting: By managing human risk efficiently, organizations can use budget savings for other key initiatives.
Q: What do KnowBe4 customers say about AIDA?
Here are some reviews from KnowBe4 customers:
- "The KSAT is beneficial in not only security awareness training, but the AIDA add-on allows for proprietary policy ingestion and quiz generation to satisfy annual policy acceptances." - Mid-Market Organization
- "The ability to automate it with the AIDA features, you can set it and forget it!" - Cybersecurity Analyst, Versant Power
- "The AI-driven personalization has helped target our account holders with specific information relevant to their areas of interest or specialization. This helps reduce training fatigue as we rely on the AI system to supply relevant training based on actions and history that make sense to the account holder. There really is not a reason to supply accounting security awareness training to non-accounting people. KnowBe4 AI helps us solve this problem.” - Team Lead in Information Technology, Higher Education Company
- "Recently KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training introduced new AI feature which enhanced the awareness training overall and the phishing simulations by assigning the users automatically to awareness training based on the type of weakness or actions that the user failed when getting any phishing email that is simulated and monitored by the platform.” - Oil & Energy Company
Q: Who is Harlan Parrott?
Harlan Parrott is the new Vice President of AI Innovation at KnowBe4. He is a patent holder for machine learning and cybersecurity applications and brings more than 20 years of experience building SaaS and cloud platforms.
Q: What is Harlan Parrott responsible for?
Harlan Parrott leads KnowBe4’s Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence, driving the company’s commitment to harnessing AI across the organization to both accelerate operational efficiency and strengthen defenses against AI-driven threats.
Q: What is KnowBe4’s AI Center of Excellence?
KnowBe4’s AI Center of Excellence is focused on embedding cutting-edge AI solutions into KnowBe4’s operations and offerings. It is designed to empower teams to build and use innovative AI solutions, improving internal efficiency and accelerating product development to build the most comprehensive defense against evolving AI-driven threats.
Q: How does KnowBe4 address the risk of AI in cybersecurity?
KnowBe4 addresses both human and agentic AI risk management. The company prepares the modern workforce by training both humans and AI agents to recognize and respond to security risks, reinforcing secure behavior against evolving threats like deepfakes and hyper-personalized phishing.
Q: What is agentic AI risk management?
Agentic AI risk management refers to managing security risks associated with autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agents and ensuring that both human workers and AI tools operate securely within the business environment. KnowBe4 is the industry leader in agentic AI risk management.