Published to Whisper Club: August 17, 2026 ID: TBW2100
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT
“This Whisper Report investigates what HR tech trend will disrupt engineering hiring next. Filmed at HRTECH2025 in Las Vegas, it explores how emerging technologies are reshaping how organizations evaluate, select, and develop engineering talent. Experts examine shifts that may redefine both hiring processes and workforce composition. Cited experts: Michael Dunn Eightfold AI, Nikos Livada HireRoad, Josh Adams RChilli, Sabashan Ragavan HeyMilo, Patrick Leddin FranklinCovey Leadership, Jeff Williams Aptia, Drew Lawrence Gem, Eli Kameron Darwinbox, David Pothier FitFirst.”
Published to Whisper Club: August 10, 2026ID: TBW2096
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
This Whisper Report investigates what the most underrated UAV use case in industry. Filmed at Commercial UAV Expo 2025 in Las Vegas, it examines how drone applications are expanding in ways many organizations are overlooking. Experts explore where these capabilities are delivering unexpected value across industries. Cited experts: Dustin Brewer Zepher, Josh Woodruf AirData UAV, Kaitlyn Albertoli Buzz Solutions, Robb Monkman Teal.io, Antonio Ruan Starling, Ross Davis blueflite, Kevin Teen Aloft, Vic Moss DSPA, Bill Reynolds Central UAS Technologies, Thad King Multicopter Warehouse, Sara Abdi Parallel Flight Technologies, Federico di Napoli FlyingBasket.
Black Hat USA 2026 brought 20,000 cybersecurity professionals to Las Vegas, where researchers, vendors, and practitioners examined the evolving risks introduced by agents, AI, and increasingly complex digital environments. The event held over 100 briefings, 125 tool demonstrations and 120 sponsored sessions. Discussions across sessions and exhibits touched on agent security, threat hunting, governance, infrastructure resilience, device vulnerabilities, fraud prevention, and professional development.
The Conference
A community of 20,000 verified cybersecurity professionals gathered at Black Hat USA. Over 100 briefings, 115 tool demonstrations, 120 sponsored sessions and 425+ Exhibits and vendors gathered across the 6 days.
Cautions
Friendly reminder: this research provides examples of what was shared with us at the event, not an evaluation, validation, or recommendation of the given technology.
We were given an advance preview of the talk, “Promptward EOD: Skillful Agent Detonation” by Zenity’s CTO and Co-Founder Michael Bargury. Just by visiting the wrong website you could be compromised. They specifically demonstrate how an agent can jump from viewing a web site to gaining control of your bank account. Now that is scary.
We were also provided an exclusive summary to the session, “Obscurize: Malware for Defense and Counter Offense”. As a response to recent malware, Aaron Beardslee, Manager of Threat Research at Securonix created Obscurize. Sitting above the EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response), it acts as an additional layer. Leveraging the malware’s own fingerprint, its psychology is studied and learned. This tool then makes a sandbox look like a bare metal system or a bare metal system look like a sandbox. This enables the hunter to trick the malware to kill itself or to run thinking it found the goods. The best part? Obscurize is free and publicly available for your to use during your threat hunting!
Fast track adoption of agents has organizations trying to keep up and stay safe. Sometimes in the chaos, the best laid plans go astray. Sometimes, guardrails are not enough. We have all read the horror stories of agents gone wild! Meet PointGuard AI the ultimate kill switch for agents. Avepoint aims to be your unifying trust layer for AI. Their focus is cloud security, safe data governance, and resiliency challenges across the AI stack.
If you are Fortune 2000 and concerned about tracking agents, Zenity was looking to meet you! Softbank and other clients leverage Zenity to understand what data is being touched by agents and what that intent of those agents are. Not only that it will steer agents into the correct direction to help keep them on track.
Mission critical infrastructure for sovereign AI that is private to you. Cogl provides a knowledge graph and enables threat hunting and investigation in a transparent and secure manner. As you might expect, this technology is leveraged in environments ranging from the Department of Defence to banking.
Focusing on the Security Operations Center, BlueVoyant brings what they like to call ‘holistic protections’. Their approach combines internal monitoring and ecosystem oversight. Traditional operating challenges are now assisted by AI driven agentic capabilities. The four risks they aim to mitigate include: data security and leakage, identity vulnerabilities, supply chain and vendor risks, and operational inefficiencies.
Threat hunting is the ultimate game of cat and mouse in cybersecurity. Securonix was on site to share their tool with fellow threat hunters. Whether you want your sandbox to trap the threat or to let it run to so you may study it’s behavior, Securonix provides both options. They even have their own threat hunting team that regularly leverages the tool as they assist the clients security their own environments.
One of our favorite areas is at the edge, connected devices and the Internet of Things – IoT. These devices span from connected vehicles to the simple fire alarms in your home. These devices often bring vulnerabilities. Due to the difficulty in updating their firmware, connected device firmware vulnerabilities become your environment’s weakest point and the point of failure. Finite State focuses on assisting companies reduce the noise as they test their products before shipping. This noise reduction enables their clients to find their vulnerabilities before they ship products to their customers.
Today, a wire money transfer is frequently still sent in plain text. Thus, it is not surprising it is a huge target of fraud. Introducing InoQlate! A Canadian non-profit providing a solution to your wire transfer security issues. Close that door to fraud and stop sending wire transfer information over plain text communication lines!
Seeking a boutique penetration firm? Meet the white hats from Black Hills Information Security. They beg you to make their lives harder! They don’t want to succeed when they try to break into your infrastructure! Providing penetration testing, SOC operations, IR (incident response), and training. Perhaps the most unique thing coming out of Black Hills Information Security is their well known communication medium: Comics! Their security comic series titled, “The Future is ***” available at 750 comic book stores. Not only that, their wisdom is available via a game to make training even more approachable. The game Back Doors & Breaches boasts over 150,000 sales to date.
Finally, the ultimate organization for security professionals, ISC2 was in expo hall. Known as the largest professional organization for cyber security professionals, there is likely a chapter near you! Providing certifications, community and advice with the goal to the make the world a safer place.
Cybersecurity specialists gathered on the Las Vegas Strip for Black Hat 2026 and it did not disappoint. Over 20,000 verified attendees gathered for over 100 briefings, 115 tool demonstrations, 120 sponsored session and over 425 exhibits and vendors. The only expected thing we didn’t hear much of is organizations preparing for the quantum impact to cybersecurity. You may recall last year we were the first ones given permission to video expo hall at Black Hat USA. This year, enjoy a first ever live Black Hat USA walkabout while expo hall its open. We once again live streamed from on site to share the experience. Be sure to catch coverage on my syndicated segment on the nationally broadcast edition of Computer Talk Radio.
While at Black Hat, we conducted research for 9 additional forthcoming Whisper Reports. The playlists are unlisted but available with the video version to be distributed via YouTube Whisper Club upper tier membership area on our YouTube Channel first.
Readers and viewers wishing to experience the entire event are encouraged to view the Conference Whispers: Black Hat USA 2026 Playlist in its entirety. The playlist will be cited in the end screen, description, and as a pinned comment of the video edition.
The video edition will conclude with gratitude towards those that contributed and a montage of responses to Bonus Question, “What’s the best part about attending Black Hat USA live in Las Vegas?”.
The Black Hat USA will once again return to Las Vegas and will be held at the Mandalay Bay on August 3-8, 2027.
*When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.
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“Ai4 2026 experiencing over 50% growth and welcomed more than 12,000 in the enterprise AI ecosystem to Las Vegas. Over 100 countries were represented amongst attendees and 400 exhibitors. Vendors, startups, and practitioners discussed what it takes to move artificial intelligence beyond experimentation. Conversations across the show floor touched on governance, deployment, security, agents, data accessibility, software delivery, and business process transformation as organizations continued evaluating paths toward large scale adoption.”
A community of over 12,000 came together in Las Vegas for the 9th annual Ai4 event. Attendance grew by over 50% at the 9th annual event. Vendors grew from 250 in 2025 to 400 in 2026.
Start-ups were also present growing from 25 last year to 66 this year.
Cautions
Friendly reminder: this research provides examples of what was shared with us at the event, not an evaluation, validation, or recommendation of the given technology.
It’s wonderful when an individual AI pilot works, maybe even delivers business value to a department. Getting that solution to deploy corporate wide is very different. Engineers that have worked in the largest organizations always smile when they see the demos and chuckle inside as looks great but what about at my scale. For those seeking industrialized AI delivery, ModelOp is a delivery engine meant to overcome frictions that occur during integration. It’s purpose is to enable those organizations to take the idea and realize it in production for the entire organization.
Governance was on the mind of many. Actualyze AI was founded by repeat founders who have spent their careers in large scale infrastructure and transformations. They focused their solution on protecting data, models routing, financial spend, and the type of infrastructure a technology requires to become part of enterprise IT.
For business work flows that make a difference, Evalueserve wants to remind you, don’t start with the technology to enable scale. Their organization focuses on business workflows that make a difference. They serve life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing and consumer good verticals. While many solutions leverage AI, many metrics such as cost and quality do not require AI. Never approximate when math can get you the precise answer.
One critical aspect of reliability is the infamous undo button or some method of recovery. There is rule in cybersecurity to assume when not if; as such one must prepare for how to recover when it goes wrong. It may be quite wise to adopt this stance in AI as well. Rubik is all about deploying agents – safely. They provide capabilities for agent monitoring, control, and something new – rewind agents. As one might suspect this includes the ability to back-up and recover from agent behavior. In their world, no agent permanently wiped out my database or the code we wrote – it can be recovered.
When you have a complex web of services, models, or agents. Understanding the complex web of dependencies is critical for operations with any type of reliability. The infamous Solar Winds incident let everyone know that the software supply chain and its dependencies are critical for security and stability. The solution turned out to be something in the industry referred to as SBOM for software bill of materials – expanding on the shipping term. Now Lineaje has thought of this problem and created a solution for AI and AI agents. Their solution provides dependency crawler, checks and suggests upgrades for compatibility and provides what they like to call security layer for agent builders.
Some environments are tougher than your average environment such as those that have required decentralization or compartmentalization of information such as government and military environments and related applications. Axonis was in expo hall to serve you. They also create a trail of decisions. Not about insights but rather save the final decision made by humans and AI. They like to think of it as a creating a feedback loop for audit and training models on past decision. They referred to it as metadata on data; we have shared this approach before. The hash of an image matched against the hash of what is in front of someone for authentication during our coverage of ISC West.
Not all AI solutions involve Large Language Models or LLMs. Modulate is a voice ai platform that provides all your common conversational understanding requirements for any conversational need. Like the advice provided in Whisper Report: Which spatial computing use case will scale fastest?, Modulate is growing through a pivot to APIs. By leveraging an architecture of highly specialized models, each trained for a narrowly defined purpose, a given application can combine them in a manner that fits its environment. Their architecture leverages these specialized models to monitor conversational tone and provide insight into intent, meaning, emotion, and context. Together they refer to their architecture as an ensemble listening model to understand and identify user behavior. This AI architectural approach of leveraging several specialized machine learning models is one that provides a high degree of success and has a long track record of enterprise results at scale.
If you have an enterprise software development team and are seeking an AI Powered DevSecOps Platform meet Digital AI. Their environment is specifically focused on regulated industries. They purported clients such as the Top 10 banks in N. America and Europe, and the top 5 Global airlines, top 4 N. American Insurance Companies. Their use of AI is very purposeful, is strictly to enhance delivery and planning capabilities to accelerate delivery.
Department strictly focused on marketing and customer data? Kana.ai marketing operating layer was designed for you. Kana provides an agentic End to end solution for marketing that moves to where the customer data’s resides offering a continuous agentic layer across marketing stack. The named elements of the marketing stack they service include: strategy planning, audience building, activation, and measurements such as MTA – multi-touch attribution and MMM Marketing Mix Modeling.
Two hurdles frequently stand in the way of AI’s success. On one hand, corporations may have their history locked up on physical books. On the other hand, organizations creating models need data to train and a controversial method of scanning physical books is involved. One reason for the controversy is that the organizations are breaking the spines to digitally scan them. Both hurdles can be solved by ARC document solutions. Another hurdle for capturing data, particularly notes are notes on the go. If find yourself want to take notes on the go or for when you are not in front of your computer, Ninja Concepts AI note takers offer you different options to fit your needs.
This enterprise AI gathering focused on adoption, implementation, governance and business outcomes. This wasn’t about the clouds and sizzle, more about show us real impact. Attendance shot up more than 50% from last year’s crowd of 8,000 to more than 12,000 attendees this year! Over 100 countries were represented and expo hall exploded from 250 exhibitors to 400! Due to their explosive growth there were some growing pains. The registration lines for some attendees was reported in excess of 90 minutes. Navigation was a bit tougher than usual as the convention put the show carpet over a large majority of the navigational booth numbers making finding vendors very very difficult. I had not witnessed this error at other events at that location previously. In addition, perhaps due to the explosive growth, the connectivity was exceptionally challenging at the same level or worse than CES. At that same time, the energy and excitement easily matched and dare I say, exceeded CES this year. At one point I recall literally realizing I could not feel my face from so much smiling. Enjoy the walkabout to and through expo hall. We always try to bring you fresh vendors in our coverage but you will recognize many brands in the walkabout from our coverage of other data related events such as the Informatica World, or our coverage of Put Data First.
We conducted research for Six additional forthcoming Whisper Reports for our clients. The playlists are unlisted but available with the video version to be distributed via YouTube Whisper Club upper tier membership area on our YouTube Channel.
Readers and viewers wishing to experience the entire event are encouraged to view the Conference Whispers: Ai4 2026 Playlist in its entirety. The playlist will be sited in the end screen, description, and as a pinned comment of the video edition.
The video will conclude with gratitude towards those that contributed and a montage of responses to Bonus Question, “What’s the best part about attending the Ai4 live in Las Vegas?”.
The Ai4 will once again return to Las Vegas and will be held at the Venetian Expo on August 4-6, 2027.
*When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.
Corporate Headquarters
2884 Grand Helios Way
Henderson, NV 89052
Downloading, re-uploading, or redistributing this file is not permitted under any license.
Published to Whisper Club: August 3, 2026 ID: TBW2203
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT
“This Whisper Report investigates what room problem professionals are solving right now as explored at InfoComm 2026 in Las Vegas. Experts highlight challenges across reliability, visibility, and acoustic constraints, revealing that foundational execution still determines experience quality. The most critical improvements may emerge where automation and control meet physical limitations. Cited experts: Claudia Barbiero PTZ Optics, Erik Zaro Crescendo Research, Mike Sullivan-Trainor AVIXA.”
Filmed on site at IC26, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada June 17-18, 2026. TBW Advisors LLC retains full editorial independence. Supporters receive credit acknowledgment only and have no role in editorial decisions, content selection, or production. Special thanks to AVIXA for press credentials.
“This Whisper Report investigates what the next SolarWinds-level breach waiting to happen may be. Filmed at Black Hat USA 2025 in Las Vegas, it examines how rapidly evolving technologies are introducing new risks that organizations may not yet fully understand. Experts explore where these emerging vulnerabilities could surface at scale. Cited experts: Jonathan Rende Checkmarx, James Spiteri Elastic Security, Alex Lanstein StrikeReady, Brian Mehlman Cyber Innovate, Thomas Roccia Microsoft, Ariful Huq Exaforce, David DellaPelle Dune Security, Saket Bajoria Safe Security.”
Published to Whisper Club: July 20, 2026 ID: TBW2132
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT
“This Whisper Report investigates which spatial computing use case will scale fastest as explored at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. Experts surface competing pathways from infrastructure enablers to experiential breakthroughs and enterprise ROI engines, signaling different adoption curves across industries. The answer may hinge less on technology and more on where value compounds fastest. Cited experts: Wayne Liu Perfect Corp., Paul Stanford Haply, Joe Cassar dSPACE, Hagay Rozenfeld Israel Railways.”
Whisper Report: What’s the biggest risk in iGaming no one’s talking about?
Published to Whisper Club: July 13, 2026 ID: TBW2108
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT:
“This Whisper Report investigates what the biggest risk in iGaming no one’s talking about. Filmed at G2E 2025 in Las Vegas, it explores how emerging risks are challenging platform integrity, operational control, and long-term industry viability. Experts examine areas where oversight gaps could create significant consequences. Cited experts: Justin Cosnett Continent 8 Technologies, Wanor Franca CCT, Phil Simpson fullstory, Matt DeLauro Seon, Erik Regan Plotline, Chris Chuang Relay, Will Shuckburgh eCOGRA, Aaron Jones Incisor.”
Published to Whisper Club: July 6, 2026 ID: TBW2191
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT:
“This Whisper Report investigates what data problem slows AI adoption most. Filmed at Informatica World 2026 in Las Vegas, it explores how trust, quality, governance, and data fit shape enterprise AI outcomes. Experts reveal why foundational data issues persist and continue to block progress. Cited experts: Rohit Meheta Accenture, Sourabh Arora Incept Data Solutions, Sumeet Agrawal Informatica, Sauvik Banerjee Cognizant.”
Published to Whisper Club: June 29, 2026 ID: TBW2198
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT
“This Whisper Report investigates what licensing trend will reshape retail in 2027. Filmed at Licensing Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, it explores how emerging models are changing how brands connect with consumers and drive retail outcomes. Experts examine why traditional approaches are giving way to more immersive and conversion-driven strategies. Cited experts: Andrew Lieb JRL Group, Elizabeth McLead Screeny, Ashley Siler LMCA.”
