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Dan Streetman likes a metaphor. As a former member of the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force, Tanium’s CEO first saw the UK from an unusual angle – 300 metres up in the air descending onto Salisbury Plain. He also saw first-hand, as part of that early career in the forces, the power of partnership and working to achieve a collective mission.
Streetman’s mission has changed somewhat since those days. Today it’s all about supporting security and IT operations teams on the front line. At Tanium Converge London, we heard how the endpoint management vendor is helping SecOps and ITOps teams keep enterprises safe as AI changes the rules of the game.
“I love the community here and how it stays focused on what’s important,” said Streetman during the opening keynote. “Like we did back then, each of you prepares consistently every single day, for every contingency.
“Each of you continues to collaborate and cross the boundaries of your organisation. And you work without fanfare against the threats and potential chaos of today’s world.”
Here, we provide an overview not only of what Dan Streetman had to say, but attendees from the event and key quotes from Tanium EMEA SVP David Tredwell.
For SecOps and ITOps teams, life used to be far simpler. According to Streetman, the average time between vulnerability disclosure and attack eight years ago was 847 days. Last year it was down to 23 days. In 2026, he claimed, it’s only a day – while the number of exploitable vulnerabilities is expected to grow by 300%.
The culprit is Anthropic’s Mythos, or rather Mythos and all the AI models like it that will soon become the norm, enabling threat actors to do what they’ve never been able to do before. The prospect of similarly powerful open source and Chinese models – which Anthropic’s Dario Amodei claims are just months away – have security professionals rightly nervous.
“The window between vulnerabilities and exploitation has literally collapsed,” said Tanium EMEA SVP David Tredwell. “The old playbook of detect, investigate and respond has gone out of the window. What used to take a skilled attacker months or weeks to do is, with the help of AI, taking minutes.”
For security teams, the AI threat is amplifying existing challenges. Digital investments in IoT, mobile devices, operational technology (OT) and more continue to expand the typical attack surface. Alert fatigue threatens to overwhelm security operation centres (SOCs) already struggling with skills shortages. And shadow IT and shadow AI lurk in the shadows, creating dangerous new security blind spots. Add Mythos’s bug-hunting capabilities to the mix and you have a perfect storm of cyber risk.
“For teams that are still relying on manual processes, this creates a challenge,” warned Streetman. “You will be stuck, and you will not just have little time to respond. You will shrink to zero time to respond. Your opportunities will disappear.”
He concluded: “In this world, every organisation has to be unstoppable. Our economies, our industries, institutions, our critical services are all going to rely on that. Regulators are going to demand it. And customer trust is gonna be built on our ability to deliver unstoppable business.”
So how does Tanium plan to make enterprise customers unstoppable? Its big pitch is Autonomous IT – an AI-powered, revamped version of the Tanium platform. It utilises the vendor’s linear-chaining architecture, which is capable of querying millions of endpoints in seconds. And, as the name suggests, it adds a degree of autonomous decision-making to detect vulnerabilities, self-diagnose and streamline remediation.
There’s confidence risk-scoring which uses intelligence from millions of endpoints to help users understand the impact of a change. “Ring-based” (progressive) patching ensures updates are only pushed to a small number of devices first, to minimise downtime. And there are low-code/no-code playbooks to automate complex tasks for IT and security teams.
“Autonomous IT learns from what works in other environments, steers you away from risky changes, strengthens your resilience and helps you to operate with greater efficiency,” explained Streetman.
Earlier this month, Tanium added Atlas, an autonomous operating system which introduces AI agents that continually check the environment for anomalies, configuration drift and threat intelligence – helping organisations react faster to emerging threats. It enables operators to use plain-English commands, and customises each UI depending on the user.
“Our new autonomous operating system gives a single IT or security operator the data, guidance and reach to accomplish what once required an entire team – enabling you to compress your time cycles, shrink your teams when you think it’s appropriate, and to do more, more efficiently, more quickly and more safely,” claimed Streetman.
Customers seem to be impressed with the Tanium vision, even if some are less concerned about the immediate impact of post-Mythos vulnerability exploits on their day-to-day operations.
“We’re looking at where [agentic AI] can take our IT organisation, but it still seems some way off at the moment,” one Tanium retail customer told TechFinitive. “We’ve not seen that [Mythos-level] speed of exploitation but we know it’s coming. The question is how soon. Because we don’t have budget at the moment for all the things we need.”
Another customer, a SecOps leader in healthcare, told TechFinitive of Mythos: “There are a lot of alarm bells ringing but I’m not sure how close we are to it.” He shared that his organisation has been running Tanium as a proof-of-concept for six months and he likes what he’s seen so far.
“We’re currently running a convergence exercise so my day-to-day challenges are about bringing teams and technologies together. The Tanium design and how you can get a snapshot of your environment in a few seconds are great. But there’s also a benefit from retiring products, and spending less on licences and infrastructure.”
The organisation may be able to retire as many as 20 SCCM servers, while migrating from 8-10 point solutions to a single client and dashboard with Tanium – saving time and money, he explained.
Fast food giant McDonald’s has seen even more impressive results. Principal Security Architect, Rob Billingsby, explained that poor visibility into the endpoint estate created remediation issues for the firm, while manual processes ran the risk of “breaking things”.
In Germany, one of its most challenging markets for endpoint management, the move from quarterly to monthly patching drove up helpdesk staffing requirements from two to nine.
Billingsby explained that deploying Tanium has given the firm “the confidence we won’t break anything”, with devices achieving 98% compliance within a month of patches being released.
“We went from manually fixing problems to automating it,” he says of the firm’s Autonomous IT journey. “Now we can complete patching at speed and scale.”
And that was the key takeaway from Tanium Converge London. The more organisations that can follow suit, the better equipped they will be to adapt to a post-Mythos threat landscape.
