‘CrowdStrike’s Agentic Charlotte AI Helps Organizations Upcharge Their Own Defenses’: Kartik Shahani, Vice President of India and SAARC, CrowdStrike

The combination of Charlotte AI’s trusted agentic AI capabilities and expert-led threat hunting allows organizations to counter AI-enabled threats with AI-driven defense and human precision. In an exclusive conversation, Kartik Shahani, Vice President of India and SAARC, CrowdStrike explains to Bhavya Bagga, Business Reporter (Corporate & Leadership, CXO Media & APAC Media that with adversaries increasingly weaponising AI to automate, accelerate, scale and increase the sophistication of their attacks, organizations must embrace AI to supercharge their own defenses. 

Cyberattacks in India are rising both in volume and sophistication. How can CrowdStrike help protect organisations in critical sectors like BFSI, healthcare, and government against these evolving threats?

CrowdStrike’s 2025 Threat Hunting Report (THR) highlights the new nature of modern cyberattacks – the weaponisation of GenAI to scale operations and accelerate attacks. Adversaries like FAMOUS CHOLLIMA are integrating GenAI into their sophisticated insider operations, while lower tier eCrime actors are using AI to generate scripts, solve technical problems, and build malware.

Adversaries are also increasingly targeting the AI agents and systems transforming enterprise operations. CrowdStrike observed multiple threat actors exploiting vulnerabilities in tools used to build AI agents, gaining unauthenticated access, establishing persistence, harvesting credentials, and deploying malware and ransomware. These attacks demonstrate how agentic AI is expanding the enterprise attack surface, by turning autonomous workflows and non-human identities into the next frontier of adversary exploitation.

Organisations in every industry must secure their AI deployments through proactive monitoring of integrations, protection against model tampering, and misconfiguration detection. CrowdStrike’s AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM) provides comprehensive visibility and protection for AI models by detecting misconfigurations and identifying vulnerabilities. Additionally, CrowdStrike Falcon Shield secures AI agents across the SaaS stack by providing agent visibility, mapping agents to human creators, detecting risky behaviour, and enabling automatic threat containment within the unified, AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform.

CrowdStrike has expanded beyond endpoint security – which solutions are critical for organisations in India and SAARC?

Identity is the new security perimeter that organisations must secure. Adversaries no longer break in, but login as trusted users. Cloud environments are a common entry point for adversaries’ identity-driven attacks, as they seek to exploit cloud data, configurations and controls to gain access into organisations’ systems. 

Once inside, they pivot across organisations’ identities, endpoints, and cloud domains – evading detection by blending in with usual operational traffic. Adversaries’ uptake of leveraging cross-domain attacks to infiltrate organisations is highlighted by hands-on-keyboard activity rising 27% year-on-year and 81% of interactive intrusions are now malware-free.

Organisations must have a unified, AI-native security platform that provides full cross-domain visibility to understand the activity occurring throughout their system and initiate appropriate responses. Single-agent, unified platforms where modules share data and insights power advanced AI that correlates platform-wide activity, delivering machine-speed detection and response capabilities.

How is CrowdStrike engaging with its channel ecosystem to help strengthen customers’ security postures?

CrowdStrike is a channel-first company, with the channel ecosystem vital to providing customers with industry-leading cybersecurity solutions and services. With 30 modules driving customers’ cybersecurity transformation, the Falcon platform enables customers to stay ahead of evolving threats and optimise their cybersecurity investments, while providing partners with game-changing security solutions to build their valued-added customer offerings around. 

By constantly enhancing Falcon platform through breakthrough innovations and strategic acquisitions, CrowdStrike continues to reinforce our position as cybersecurity’s platform of choice for the AI era among customers and partners. CrowdStrike continues to provide its channel ecosystem with transformational programs to strengthen customers’ security postures. 

CrowdStrike Falcon Flex empowers partners to maximise value and outpace competitors with adaptable licensing for the Falcon platform’s full portfolio of best-in-class modules, while providing full flexibility to use any module they need, when they need it. CrowdStrike’s Accelerate program unites the cybersecurity partner ecosystem through industry-leading enablement, training, incentives, rewards, and support tools. While CrowdStrike’s Services Partner Program empowers GSIs, MSPs, and MSSPs to accelerate adoption of CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, with specifically designed enablement and training, performance-focused incentives, tools, resources and support. 

With AI-powered attacks becoming a reality, what differentiates CrowdStrike’s approach to AI-driven defense?

As adversaries increasingly weaponise AI to automate, accelerate, scale and increase the sophistication of their attacks, organisations must embrace AI to supercharge their own defenses. 

Most GenAI tools and security assistants follow a basic ‘ask and respond’ model that relies on humans to interpret and act. Transcending these tools, CrowdStrike’s Charlotte AI is agentic. This means it autonomously acts, detects and triages threats, recommends actions, and executes with expert-level precision. 

Charlotte AI’s key differentiator is that it’s trained on a proprietary dataset that no other vendor offers – millions of real-world triage and response decisions made by elite CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR analysts. This enables Charlotte AI Agentic Detection Triage to triage security detections with over 98% accuracy, eliminating more than 40 hours of manual work per week on average to scale SOC operations and accelerate response to the most critical threats. 

Built within a bounded autonomy framework, Charlotte AI enables organisations to define how and when automated decisions are made, giving human analysts full control to set thresholds, determine when reviews are required, and maintain oversight. This combination of trusted agentic AI capabilities and expert-led threat hunting allows organisations to counter AI-enabled threats with AI-driven defense and human precision. 

Cloud adoption is accelerating across Indian enterprises. How is CrowdStrike adapting its offerings to secure hybrid and multi-cloud environments?

Cloud adoption is accelerating, and adversaries know it – with cloud intrusions surging 136% in 2025 compared to all of 2024. This highlights the importance of having a comprehensive cloud security strategy and platform. Traditional cloud security approaches based on fragmented, bolted-on security solutions are simply not adequate for today’s threat landscape.

Organisations require a cloud security strategy that is centered on a unified approach to secure cloud applications, identities, infrastructure, workloads, AI models, and SaaS – all from a single platform. This enables organisations to close protection gaps that adversaries exploit, while reducing complexity and costs. 

They also must reassess their runtime protection, ensure they have full visibility across their cloud environments, and adopt modern cloud detection and response (CDR) capabilities – through a single, unified security platform. This allows organisations to detect and respond to cloud-focused threats at speed.

Looking ahead, what will be the key growth drivers for CrowdStrike in India and SAARC?

Organisations need AI-powered, unified security platforms from a business and security perspective. From a business perspective, adopting a platform approach to security delivers on the need for consolidation, simplification, and a reduction in operational costs. From a security perspective, AI-native, unified security platforms provide the force-multiplying agentic AI capabilities that shrink the time to detect and respond to threats. 

These AI-driven advantages help organisations regain precious time in defending against adversaries, who themselves are increasingly embracing AI to be faster and more effective in exploiting organisations. CrowdStrike’s unified, AI-native Falcon platform is the cybersecurity platform for the agentic AI era that organisations need to stop the breach.