The Future of Security Lives Where Work Happens
Why the next era of cybersecurity will be built for people, not just experts.
A conversation with Brandon Dixon, CTO and co-founder of Ent
For decades, cybersecurity has been built around experts who investigate alerts and respond after risk has already emerged. Brandon Dixon, co-founder and CTO of Ent, has spent his career helping organizations make sense of increasingly complex security signals. He co-founded PassiveTotal, which was later acquired by RiskIQ, and served as a Security AI Strategist at Microsoft, where he launched Microsoft Security Copilot. Today Brandon believes AI creates an opportunity to fundamentally rethink who cybersecurity is built for, by bringing expertise to the people doing the work, reading intent in the moment, and protecting work before risk becomes an incident.
For most of cybersecurity's history, security has been built around experts.
Organizations invested in security teams, specialized tools, and increasingly sophisticated systems designed to help trained professionals investigate threats and respond to incidents. As attacks became more complex, the industry responded by creating more visibility, more telemetry, and more data for experts to analyze.
That approach shaped much of Brandon's career.
"So much of my career has been about building security systems and tools for the expert with the idea that if we can give them the advantage, then we can stop the adversary from being successful and better protect organizations."
For years, Brandon focused on helping security professionals better defend their organizations through improved visibility, intelligence, and security systems.
But as new technologies emerged, Brandon began to see an opportunity to rethink who security was built for.
Why now: the technology finally makes it possible
At Microsoft, Brandon had an early view into how fast generative AI was evolving and what these new models were capable of unlocking. As he watched the technology evolve, he became increasingly convinced that it would fundamentally change security. Not just by giving experts another tool, but by reaching everyone else.
"What excited me most was the fact that we could democratize knowledge and the capability of security by putting it in the hands of not an expert user, but users who are just trying to do the right thing in their job."
For years, the idea of bringing security reasoning directly to where people worked was difficult to achieve. While the vision was compelling, the technology was not yet ready to operate where decisions were being made.
That began to change as AI models matured.
AI could understand intent, bringing context, reasoning, and expertise closer to the moment decisions were being made. For the first time, people could understand not just what they were doing, but whether those actions aligned with the goals of the organization.
Brandon and Lou shared a conviction about what would follow.
"The reason why we started the company was that eventually I knew that these models would become cheaper, faster, more efficient, and that they would be made available to operate at the edge where people actually worked."
Once reasoning could run locally, security expertise no longer had to stay confined to the SOC. It could move into the flow of work itself. Prevention at the moment risk occurs becomes a possibility.
How it works: reading intent, not just activity
The hard part was not about detecting that something happened. It was understanding why. The same action can be routine or dangerous depending on who takes it, what is normal for them, and what they are trying to do.
Brandon's team took a lesson from self-driving cars. Early systems tried to hard-code a rule for every situation and broke the moment the road changed. The breakthrough came from building a world model that understood the environment and could predict what would happen next. Ent does the same for the enterprise. It builds an organizational work model, a living understanding of how people and agents actually operate, so it can tell normal work from real risk instead of relying on brittle rules. The platform reads behavior across every application on the endpoint, infers intent with that context, and acts in the moment.
The everyday case makes it concrete. In a Fortune 500 deployment, an HR employee activated an unsanctioned AI assistant inside a sanctioned communication tool and nearly pasted patient records into it. No static rule could have caught that. A behavioral layer that understands intent did, and stepped in before the data left.
Security that works alongside you
For Brandon, the promise of AI was not just a more efficient SOC. It is about enabling non-experts to become better security investigators and responders and educating users about security in real-time.
"I didn't want to build just another expert tool. I wanted to be in a position where I was helping the average person be better at security, ideally without them ever having to know about it. But in the event that they did have to know about it, educating them at the same time. And that's why we founded Ent."
His vision is a workplace where people focus on their jobs and security runs quietly underneath, present when it is needed and invisible when it is not. Whether someone is collaborating with colleagues, using applications, or working with AI tools, protection should be available in the moment and unobtrusive the rest of the time.
"What excites me most is the ability to have security operate behind the scenes while people do their jobs, where they never have to become an expert at all. It's as if an expert is running locally on their system."
That is the shift Brandon is working on: not asking people to become security specialists, but putting an expert in the flow of their work.
The road ahead
The opportunity AI creates goes well beyond improving today's tools. For Brandon, it is a chance to change how people experience security entirely.
As AI keeps evolving, security can become more deeply woven into the work itself, operating in the background while people focus on their jobs and reading intent in real time across both users and agents.
"The overarching vision that I have is that one day, regardless of experience, without even thinking about it, you're capable of doing your job or doing things that you enjoy, being productive on your computer and your system, and you don't have to worry about security because something like Ent is running on that system and protecting you, bringing that reasoning directly to where you work."
Throughout his career, Brandon built technologies designed to help experts defend organizations against adversaries. What excites him most now is the opportunity to bring that same knowledge and reasoning directly to the people doing the work.
The future of cybersecurity is not about creating more expert tools. It is about making expertise available wherever work happens. It is about bringing security reasoning closer to users and AI systems, understanding intent in real time, and helping organizations protect work before risk becomes an incident.
Watch the full interview with Brandon Dixon to hear more about the future of cybersecurity, why security expertise should live where work happens, and the vision behind Ent.
To learn more about Ent and our vision for securing human and AI-driven work, visit ent.ai.
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