AiThority Interview with Brian Gumbel, President and Chief Operations Officer at Dataminr

Brian Gumbel, President and Chief Operations Officer at Dataminr chats about Marketing in the AI and IT space, AI to detect the earliest signals of significant events, and tips for innovation and growth for AI leaders in this Q&A:

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Hi Brian, welcome to our AiThority Interview series.  Can you share a brief overview of your career journey and your role at Dataminr?

 Hi, it’s a pleasure to join you. I’ve had a very interesting career journey and my path has been anything but straightforward. After multiple major changes in college, I graduated from Marist College with a pre-med degree. I found that direct patient care wasn’t the right fit for me, but I was determined to find a career that allowed me to use the skills and knowledge I had gained while studying pre med, so I took a short-term sales position at NET-tel. I learnt so much about myself and my ambitions during my time at NET-tel; I just excelled and fell in love with technology and customer engagement. I realized that was the avenue I wanted to pursue so I decided to leave medicine behind, and that has proved the right decision.

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Once I knew the path for me, I then relentlessly pursued a recruiter at Cisco. After a grueling 9-month interview process, I landed my first role as a commercial account manager and never looked back!

Since then, I’ve held commercial and government sales leadership roles at McAfee, Tanium, Forescout, and most recently Armis where I served as President and Chief Revenue Officer. Then, this April, I joined Dataminr as President and Chief Operating Officer to provide strategic guidance across the entire business and bolster the company’s growth momentum. As Dataminr enters its next phase of growth, I am working to drive its GTM strategy, building on the company’s existing customer base and getting its powerful technology into the hands of customers who need it.

Dataminr is a leading AI platform provider. Can you discuss how its technology transforms global corporations and public sector agencies that handle high-impact events and emerging risks?

Sure. At Dataminr, we’re fundamentally reshaping the future of real-time information. We’ve combined deep expertise in both AI and public data to create a platform that detects events, risks and threats from over one million public data sources at a global scale – all in real time. Our platform then uses generative AI to describe those events as they unfold.

To bring this technology to life, let me share a recent experience. This past spring, when a ship hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, Dataminr alerted its customers a full 74 minutes before any major news publications. The situation was changing by the minute, and it was difficult for authorities, supply-chain organizations, news agencies and first responders to have an up-to-the-minute situational understanding. But thanks to Dataminr’s capabilities, our customers had the comprehensive context they needed to fully understand the situation and potential vulnerabilities for them – and to respond effectively.

Events like this are happening more frequently and with greater intensity than ever before – driven by things like geopolitical instability and an escalating climate crisis, making the need for reliable, actionable information critical. When a disaster strikes, public and private sector organizations alike need early and actionable insights to respond effectively. That’s why our real-time AI platform is built to detect the earliest signals of high-impact events and emerging risks from within publicly available data, giving customers the confidence to act swiftly and strategically.

How does Dataminr leverage AI to detect the earliest signals of significant events?

Our AI platform processes billions of public data points every day – from more than a million sources and in over 150 languages. To process this immense volume, our platform uses AI to perform trillions of lightning-fast computations on each of these data units.

We’re constantly looking for ways to make this sheer scale of information even more actionable for our customers. To this end, one of the things I’m most excited about is our latest AI breakthrough; the launch of regenerative AI (or ReGenAI) in April. ReGenAI is the fusion of two of our existing technologies – multimodal fusion AI and generative AI. We first pioneered the multimodal fusion AI category for real-time event detection, which identifies trends from text, image, video, and sound sources, and fuses that data together to alert about an event as it happens. We then integrate generative AI to describe that event to our customers – and create 200,000 event descriptions every single day.

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We joined those two capabilities together to pioneer ReGenAI – a new category of AI that automatically regenerates event briefs as the situation unfolds. What makes ReGenAI so special is that it goes beyond simply generating static reports: unlike generative AI, ReGenAI does not need a prompt. It automatically creates a description of an event as it takes place, updating to reflect new and emerging information. This has allowed us to move past the limitations of static event reports, and ensures key leaders always have the most up to date information to make sure they are best placed to make critical decisions. This has completely changed the game for leaders who need to stay ahead in rapidly evolving situations: this is the future of real-time information.

Cybersecurity is a critical concern for many organizations today. How does Dataminr’s platform address cybersecurity threats, and what sets it apart from other solutions in the market?

Because we know just how much is at stake for our clients, cybersecurity is of the utmost importance to us. Our real-time cyber event, risk and threat detection solution allows organizations – both in the public and private sector – to build cyber resilience across four key pillars.

First, digital risk intelligence addresses areas such as data breach alerts, phishing campaign prevention, domain name and account impersonations, leaked credentials, and fraud detection. The second pillar is third-party risk intelligence. We have the ability to detect ransomware attacks on critical partners and customers, data leaks and leaked credentials sold by threat actors, online impersonation and DDoS and website defacement, just to name a few. Third, there’s our vulnerability intelligence, identifying emerging and trending vulnerabilities, ongoing exploitations, vulnerability disclosures and research. The final pillar is around cyber-physical intelligence. We look at physical threats to IT and OT infrastructures — things like natural disasters, disruption and outages, warding off cyber warfare and other happenings within supply chain disruptions.

And you asked what sets us apart from other solutions; it’s our speed and accuracy. Our customers have found that Dataminr regularly beats out other vendors when alerting on breaking news, and provides cyber threat intelligence programs with timely and relevant alerts that assist analysts with actioning defensive measures against cyber threats. One customer said our real-time alerts have helped decrease their incident response time by nearly 70%. And that’s an awesome review! I’ve always been incredibly customer-centric and the whole team at Dataminr is proud of the trust our customers place in us, it drives us to continuously innovate to deliver the most relevant and timely intelligence available.

Marketing in the AI and IT space can be challenging. How do you position Dataminr’s unique value proposition to compete with the market leaders?

Yes, marketing in this space can be a challenge, but my approach is to listen to our customers and focus on how we solve their key problems. Mainstream media or traditional security vendors often simply report on the biggest threats and events, such as terrorist attacks, severe natural disasters, global conflict or large-scale public disruptions. However, in reality, it is often company-specific threats or hyper-local incidents that pose a far greater risk to operations or the safety of employees. We have a deep understanding of the real challenges our customers face.

Security teams face major challenges when identifying these types of under-reported events or risks, because the scale and array of public data is so vast. That’s why AI is essential; it is the only solution to the public data challenge. It delivers the speed, scope, and relevance companies need for rapid detection and response to corporate security risks, threats, and events.

At the same time, the recent boom and influx of media attention on AI has led to the technology becoming a ubiquitous buzzword, making it challenging to discern genuine AI innovation from mere marketing. Dataminr’s platform addresses this by cutting through the noise with an AI-powered solution that delivers impactful results for our customers. We provide real, actionable insights with unmatched speed, scope, and precision, uncovering risks and threats that other sources simply can’t match.

Dataminr recently appointed Matthew Harrell as the new Chief Partner Officer to expand your partner ecosystem. What impact do you anticipate this will have on Dataminr’s growth and market reach?

 Bringing on Matt as our new Chief Partner Officer is a strategic move to expand our partner ecosystem. Matt has already begun to play a crucial role in identifying and developing new partner opportunities to bring emerging AI applications, services and solutions to market.

Matt comes to Dataminr with a strong track record from his time at organizations like Cloudflare and Google Cloud, where he successfully leveraged partner channels to accelerate GTM efforts and make significant impacts on revenue growth. He’s well-equipped to use this expertise to leverage this experience as he works to grow and scale our partner ecosystem to meet the accelerating global demand for our products.

Matt is a major asset for Dataminr, and the right fit to help scale our customer base. We see a massive runway ahead and are confident that Matt will enable us to tap into the full potential of our partner capabilities.

Please highlight some upcoming innovations at Dataminr that you are particularly excited about.

 Looking ahead, we are going to continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and public data in terms of transforming the future of real-time information. As the first AI platform that spans predictive AI, generative AI, and now ReGenAI, we’re opening up a new frontier of possibilities. We’ve just scratched the surface of how our AI platform can truly have an impact in the world.

Of course, we also have ambitions to become a public company. As the world is in the midst of a seminal moment in the evolution of AI, Dataminr is poised to be a category defining public company. The future holds incredible potential, and we’re eager to see how our innovations will shape it.

What are the top five tips you would like to give to today’s AI leaders aiming to drive innovation and growth before we wrap up?

 My top five tips for driving innovation and growth are:

1. Strive for lifelong learning: Our field is rapidly evolving, so staying up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies through certifications, industry events, and networking is crucial.
2. Adopt a solution-oriented approach: I try to approach challenges with a proactive mindset and a relentless pursuit of helping solve our customers biggest problems. Developing a strong foundation in problem-solving and communication skills will greatly enhance leaders’ ability to navigate the complex challenges presented by evolving technology.
3. Create a collaborative culture: I believe leaders should promote cross-functional collaboration within their organizations to ensure a cohesive and optimal working environment. By fostering cohesion within and across teams, organizations are best prepared to adapt swiftly and address any obstacles that come their way.
4. Have an innovation mindset: The most effective leaders understand the importance of an innovation mindset. It fosters creativity, experimentation and continuous learning, and encourages teams to embrace new technology and look for ways to improve productivity.
5. Contribute to an inclusive workplace: Promoting an inclusive work culture is not only crucial for the well-being of employees but also enables a business to function better, be more productive, and achieve greater success. I firmly believe effective leadership begins with open conversations and listening, which is universal and not just isolated to DEI.

 Thank you, Brian, for sharing your insights with us.

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