A few months after RSAC Conference, the AI pitch on the show floor sounds about the same, and the people listening to it do not. Recorded on location at Black Hat USA 2026, this conversation tracks what actually moved between the two events and what buyers are now asking before they sign.
Daniel Bardenstein, CEO and Co-Founder of Manifest Cyber, uses RSAC Conference as a fixed point and compares it to what he is hearing in Las Vegas. The marketing has held its shape. At RSAC Conference, companies with little claim to the label were describing themselves as agentic. Here, he cites a survey referenced in a talk that morning counting 47 AI SOC companies among the vendors on site.
What has moved is scrutiny. Practitioners and security leaders are pressing on what differentiates one AI product from another and whether a product is a thin layer built around a frontier model. Bardenstein also reports conversations about open weight models and reduced dependency on frontier lab providers following the OpenAI Hugging Face incident and the White House action on Fable and Mythos. Contracting is shifting as well, with procurement teams adding due diligence and paperwork whenever AI shows up inside a product.
Marco Ciappelli raises the question sitting under the label. Agentic AI brought questions about how many agents are running and who owns their identity, and AI SOC suggests an operations center assembled largely from automation. Bardenstein points to narrower use cases teams already trust, including finding vulnerabilities in source code and suggesting patches, then offers his own test for buyers. Does it reduce vulnerabilities, does it reduce false positives, does it deliver faster outcomes and fewer breaches.
This is a Brand Briefing. A Brand Briefing is an on-location conversation recorded on site at Black Hat USA 2026, putting a spotlight on the guest and their company and pairing it with the editorial reach of ITSPmagazine. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/performance/#briefing
GUEST
Daniel Bardenstein, CEO and Co-Founder at Manifest Cyber
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bardenstein/
RESOURCES
Black Hat USA 2026 event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/black-hat-usa-2026-cybersecurity-event-coverage-in-las-vegas
Manifest Cyber: https://www.manifestcyber.com/
Are you interested in telling your story?
▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full
▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight
▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight
▶︎ Get your own Brand Briefing at an upcoming event: https://www.studioc60.com/buy-brand-briefings
KEYWORDS
daniel bardenstein, manifest cyber, marco ciappelli, brand briefing, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, black hat usa 2026, ai soc, agentic ai, ai in cybersecurity, vendor differentiation, open weight models, frontier models, security procurement, ai due diligence, software supply chain security