Meriam ElOuazzani, Senior Regional Director, META, SentinelOne, in an exclusive conversation with Techitup ME, shares highlights of their GISEC 2025 presence – from live threat-hunting demos to next-gen Purple AI capabilities and intelligent cybersecurity platforms
Can you please tell us about SentinelOne’s presence and showcase at GISEC 2025?
GISEC is a key collaborative space for us. We bring together experts from across regions, including Europe and the US, who bring with them deep experience, real-world use cases, and best practices. This diversity allows us to offer our customers and partners in the region meaningful insights and support.
We’ve had strategic conversations with leading regional customers and CIOs, where we’ve shared the latest on SentinelOne’s evolution. While many still know us as an EDR provider, we’ve expanded far beyond that. SentinelOne is now a comprehensive XDR platform, integrating identity, cloud security, and more, culminating in innovations like our Singularity Data Lake and Purple AI.
At GISEC, it’s not just about talking tech, it’s about showing it. Through hands-on demos, customers can see firsthand how our capabilities work in their environments. We’re also helping customers refine their cybersecurity strategies and working closely with partners and alliances to drive integrations beyond our platform, leveraging APIs for expanded functionality.
Our DNA is channel-driven. We scale through strong, on-the-ground partnerships, partners who not only support the product but also ensure seamless deployment, adoption, and service across the customer journey.
Tell us about the recent release of Purple AI ‘Athena.’ What’s new and how does it build on previous capabilities?
Athena marks the second major release of Purple AI, which was originally designed to simplify threat data analysis through natural language queries. The new Athena upgrade introduces iterative thinking and reasoning capabilities.
This means Purple AI can now continuously learn from added context and evolving data inputs, allowing for more dynamic and precise threat analysis. It mimics how a human analyst would think, processing context, correlating signals, and making intelligent decisions.
We’re essentially moving from manual workloads to automated, intelligent threat detection and response. Athena enhances SOC efficiency by enabling security teams to ask complex questions in simple language and receive insightful, actionable responses in real time.
How is AI transforming SecOps, especially in terms of faster detection and response?
Great question. Today, many attacks we see are zero-day attacks, because adversaries are already using AI to build and deploy them. This has forced defenders to evolve just as quickly.
At SentinelOne, we use AI to detect and stop these attacks within seconds. In fact, attackers can compromise a system in as little as 51 seconds, so our technology must act instantly. Our AI doesn’t rely on signatures, it understands behavioral patterns and identifies malicious activity in real time.
We also enable rollback capabilities, so if a ransomware attack occurs, customers can restore systems to a pre-attack state, essentially going back to day zero. Our Singularity Platform spans across endpoint, identity, cloud, and mobile, pulling in and correlating massive amounts of data to accelerate detection and automated response.
With attackers growing more sophisticated, how is SentinelOne strengthening XDR across cloud, endpoint, and identity?
Many organizations still associate us with EDR, but we’re now fully invested in delivering robust XDR capabilities. We secure cloud environments, which are often mistakenly assumed to be the sole responsibility of cloud providers.
Our solution ensures that identity, endpoint, and cloud surfaces are all protected. The cloud is a growing attack vector, so we’ve made substantial investments in cloud security, providing complete posture management, threat detection, and response all through our Singularity Platform.
Can you tell us about the ‘Mortal vs. Machine’ concept at your booth. What can visitors expect?
It’s one of our most popular live demos. We invite someone from the crowd, regardless of their background, even marketing or sales, and ask them to conduct a live threat-hunting exercise using our Purple AI assistant. They compete against a SentinelOne security engineer to detect and investigate threats using plain English.
This demo shows the power of our AI in simplifying cybersecurity workflows. People with little to no cybersecurity experience can uncover ransomware attacks in minutes, just by asking the right questions through Purple AI. It makes AI real, tangible, and accessible.
It also helps demystify AI. Many people hear about AI but don’t understand how it works in practice. With “Mortal vs. Machine,” we bring that clarity to life, right on the show floor.
