A free download, a hackathon running a few feet away, and a security community that has stopped asking whether AI belongs in the SOC and started asking who governs it. Monzy Merza explains why sovereignty, model choice, and consistency arrived together this year.
Espresso in hand at Black Hat USA 2026, Monzy Merza, Co-Founder and CEO of Crogl, gave Marco Ciappelli the read from a week that started Monday. The free download the company announced the week before had drawn a strong community reaction, and a hackathon was running alongside the conversation with people downloading Crogl, hacking on it, and competing in challenges. Merza credits the openness of the approach as much as the product.
What do security teams want from AI right now? Sovereignty. Merza describes a movement in which organizations have concluded that any work with AI has to cover privacy and security of the product and of the AI workload itself. Crogl was built as an on-prem product from the very beginning to serve mission critical organizations and critical infrastructure operators with hard requirements, and a larger community is now arriving at the same principles and asking what should be governed.
The second shift is operational. The question moved from whether to look at AI to how work stays consistent and repeatable when one model is swapped for another, prompted by outages across model providers and in-house AI services going up and down. Merza describes the arc as a pendulum, from avoiding AI, to human in the loop, to a stretch where autonomy dominated. Crogl customers now run it both interactively and fully autonomously, with the line drawn at the tasks where a human has little reason to sit in the loop.
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
Monzy Merza, Co-Founder and CEO at Crogl
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monzymerza/
RESOURCES
Black Hat USA 2026 event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/black-hat-usa-2026-cybersecurity-event-coverage-in-las-vegas
Learn more about Crogl: https://www.crogl.com
Download Crogl: https://www.crogl.com/download
Crogl newsroom: https://www.crogl.com/newsroom
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KEYWORDS
monzy merza, crogl, marco ciappelli, brand briefing, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, black hat usa 2026, sovereign ai, on prem ai, ai governance, security operations, model choice, ai workload security, critical infrastructure, autonomous investigation, human in the loop, free download, hackathon, security community