We ran Exaforce's first out-of-home campaign across 28 locations in San Francisco this summer. Within days it is trending, but not because of anything we designed. Someone had climbed up to one of our boards and written, in letters taller than our headline, exactly what they thought of AI billboards. On another, underneath "AI attacks fast. We respond faster," someone added a question: How much of the trillion-dollar AI economy is going to working-class SF?
I want to say up front that I'm not mad about this. Nobody at Exaforce is. We get it. They looked at a company with "AI" in its pitch, spending a lot of money to talk at the city, and they asked the only question that matters: who is this actually for? We're not going to pretend that isn't a fair question. That's a good question. AI is changing how people work, how companies operate and how quickly new technologies reach the market. It's reasonable to ask who benefits from that change, who bears the risks and whether the people on the receiving end are being considered alongside the people building the technology.
It's the question we ask about every vendor that walks into a SOC. It's the question the one security person at a small company asks when a big platform shows up with another agent to deploy.
We understand the feeling
The feeling in that spray paint is what it's like to be on the receiving end of decisions made by people with far more money and power.
The attacks hitting people right now are cheap to make and they arrive at machine speed. A convincing phishing email in any language takes seconds. A voice clone of somebody's CFO takes minutes. Mapping every exposed corner of a company takes an afternoon.
Most of that got easy because of the same frontier models being sold as the future of the economy. The labs building them are some of the richest organizations that have ever existed, and whatever they ship reaches attackers the same day it reaches everyone else. And the people who pay for it are not the biggest or richest companies. Those have full security teams, budgets, and a direct line to the labs when something breaks. The ones who pay are smaller companies, and the people whose livelihoods depend on them.
And the burden of dealing with this changing threat landscape shouldn't fall only on companies with enormous security budgets and teams of hundreds.
When the attack lands, it doesn't land on the frontier labs. It lands on a company like Accton, a manufacturer with more than 20,000 people earning a living wage, where a breach isn't a line on a risk register. It's people and their paychecks. It lands on the lone defender who spent his weekend stitching alerts together instead of being home. Those are the people we defend, all day, every day, not with a slogan but with a product that actually does the investigation.
That's why we built Exaforce.
Our goal isn't to replace security professionals. It's to give them more capability. Exaforce helps security teams investigate threats, understand what happened and respond before an attack becomes something much bigger.
That's the part of the AI conversation we think deserves more attention: not just what AI can create, but what it enables people to protect.
Exaforce exists for organizations of all scales. Not just the ones who have large budgets and teams of hundreds. Our customers are across the industry. They’re running manufacturers, technology companies and other businesses where a security incident can have consequences that go far beyond a line on a risk register.
What we took from it
Security is trust, and trust is low right now. AI is making it easier to build good things and easier to do damage, and both are happening at once. If AI is going to be good for anyone beyond the companies building it, protecting the people on the receiving end can't come last. It has to come first.
The person who tagged our billboard and the security professional working a 2 a.m. incident want the same thing from this industry: proof, not promises. Our board said, "AI attacks fast. We respond faster." The message underneath asked how much of the trillion-dollar AI economy is going to working-class SF.
Fair question. Making sure those people get protected, not just sold to, is the job we signed up for. We're building for the people on the other side of the attack.
If you're planning a campaign in San Francisco, don't plan for a cleanup crew. The city will tell you what it thinks of you for free, and it'll be more honest than any focus group. We're not sending one either. The tags should stay up.
