ESET CEO Richard Marko Dives Into Cybersecurity’s AI Era
‘Nobody should worry that because of geopolitics, we will compromise the security that we are providing to our customers,’ ESET CEO Richard Marko says.
CRN caught up with Marko during the Slovakia-based cybersecurity vendor’s ESET World 2025 conference, which runs this week in Las Vegas. In the interview, Marko shared how the 33-year-old ESET is standing out from a crowded cybersecurity market and deepening integrations with vendors including Microsoft and cloud-based distributor Pax8.
“We are really independent in the sense that nobody is able to tell us, ‘You have to do this or that, otherwise we go away.’ We don’t have this kind of pressure,” Marko told CRN during the interview. “We try to see ourselves as a really global vendor. And nobody should worry that because of geopolitics, we will compromise the security that we are providing to our customers.”
[RELATED: Solution Provider Association Founder Protests Trump CISA Changes]
ESET CEO Marko
ESET has about 10,000 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.
Travis Woods, CEO of San Francisco Bay Area-based MSP Fort Point IT, told CRN in an interview that he’s been a partner with ESET for about three years and leverages the vendor for covering a lot of areas, including endpoint and cloud services.
“We made the move because it helped us displace a number of individual products,” Woods said. “But also we get a lot of support from their channel program and support in the way of marketing materials, co-branding. They helped us do a couple marketing campaigns. And we’ve also received some leads. They’re definitely a partner-first company.”
Marko told CRN that the channel remains a critical part of ESET’s go-to-market, not only to help with product implementation but because of solution providers’ roles as trusted advisers.
“Cybersecurity is about trust, and on different levels,” he said. “The important thing for the customer is to have a partner they trust because they typically don’t understand cybersecurity, they are just hearing all the risks. And the risks, in principle, are only increasing.
He said that integrations with Microsoft’s and Pax8’s marketplaces are in the works, with news “coming soon.”
As for geopolitical concerns, Marko took a diplomatic approach when asked about reports of European organizations rethinking their relationships with U.S.-based tech vendors and reported cuts at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
On CISA, Marko just said that in general “it’s helpful to have public-private partnerships.”
“What are internal policies and what are the priorities and how they shift–we typically don’t have much more information than what is available in the public,” he said. “Anybody can have their opinions.”
Here’s more of what Marko said to CRN, edited for clarity.
What’s your message to ESET’s partners coming out of ESET World 2025?
I want everybody to believe that ESET is a reliable partner who is dedicated to riding at the edge of the technology that is available to protect from cyber threats.
We are particularly strong in endpoint security. But we are also doing authentication, network security and other fields.
And we are a unique vendor. We are the last truly private, global vendor in the world, which allows us to develop the business and the technologies the way we believe is the right thing.
ESET is a long-term successful company, profitable for 30 years, which means that we, as owners of the company, are not in a position where we are looking for some quick cash or lots of money or things like that.
Why is the channel so important to ESET?
Cybersecurity is about trust, and on different levels. So the important thing for the customer is to have a partner they trust because they typically don’t understand cybersecurity, they are just hearing all the risks. And the risks, in principle, are only increasing.
They are (not only) touching the big corporations, but everybody, every single individual, is potentially a victim. So if you don’t understand the nature of the risk, you do not understand how to defend. And you need to have a partner that you can trust.
It would be beautiful if everybody knew ESET and … that ESET is a trusted partner that has existed for 33 years.
But this is not the case. People know a certain group of companies and organizations, and the trust is built over time. So we are very happy to work with the channel partners who build trust with the actual customers. And we are trying to build trust with the channel. And we are really trustful, reliable to partners.
How is customer spending on cybersecurity in the current economic climate?
It depends on the market segment. When we had the pandemic and people started to work from home, we saw growth in consumer security, for example.
Right now, when we have a less-stable geopolitical situation, it affects businesses, especially the bigger businesses, enterprises.
We see more attention to who is the provider of cybersecurity because you might feel that a provider from one region might not be reliable enough in your region.
Europe is pretty tense right now because of all the risks there are.
But in India, North America, it is not so different. It’s definitely in a better position, in a way, but the whole world is connected.
There is this geopolitical influence. And in general, the big companies are willing to invest more in security.
There have been reports of European organizations rethinking whether they want to work with U.S.-based vendors–has ESET seen any benefits from that?
We are private. We are independent. We serve tens of millions of consumers and 500,000 businesses. Many of them are small businesses.
We do businesses with big corporations and organizations, but there is no one customer that is so huge that it would affect us.
We are really independent in the sense that nobody is able to tell us, ‘You have to do this or that, otherwise we go away.’ We don’t have this kind of pressure.
We come from Europe originally. We have some big R&D (research and development) centers in Europe. But we have a strong team in North America and Latin America and Asia.
We try to see ourselves as a really global vendor. And nobody should worry that because of geopolitics, we will compromise the security that we are providing to our customers.
(ESET’s 2022 halt of sales to individuals, businesses and organizations in Russia and Belarus over the invasion of Ukraine) was a very, very specific situation for us.
We are selling in 200 countries and territories, there are really few exceptions.
Pulling out from the Russian market because of the war was an unprecedented move. But it felt like the right thing to do.
How big of a deal is the new ESET MDR for MSPs offer?
MDR is a growing part of the business for everybody, but also for us.
We are trying to really support this in a way to remove obstacles. The MSP model is nice. You pay for the use. You don’t need to make some commitments upfront.
That could be an advantage of our offering. We can give it a try, even in a small scale, find out if this is a good partnership, then you can scale it up.
What do you want partners to know about how ESET is innovating its products?
I would like them to see there is an evolution. It’s not like that we suddenly bring something different because, just like they could rely on us in the past, they will be able to in the future.
It’s bringing the latest level of technology. It is using large language models to create better pathways, better ways of communication between the machine and the technology and human, human beings.
AI Advisor, that’s going through a significant evolution.
ESET (Protect) Hub (launched in 2024 as a unified security platform to replace MSP Administrator and Business Account–migrations to Hub started in November) should be big news for channel partners because it integrates basically everything a channel partner needs under one system.
And it is further integrated into ESET’s product ecosystem. A really good overview of the customer base, what level of solutions they have, an easy way to upsell, cross-sell.
That is going to be a huge, huge difference. ESET Hub is already available for the customers. Now we are bringing it to the partners.
In cybersecurity, typically, it’s all about detecting malicious code, malicious behavior and so on.
ESET, arguably, is the best in that. But there is also an area which is somewhere between malicious and legitimate. All those shady applications.
There is much less focus on that. But ESET is doing a lot in that.
The data is additional feeds. They contain information in this area, and that is usually a very helpful addition to whatever protection anyone can have because that’s quite unique.
Now that so many security vendors are introducing AI assistants, what separates ESET’s AI Advisor?
AI, it can generate words, but the content is the key thing.
Within ESET, we have a long record of collecting cybersecurity intelligence. And we continue doing that.
Actually, the cybersecurity intelligence itself is provided as a service, as a product. We have a strong knowledge base on which these AI models can work.
You end up not only with some general descriptions, but you have very specific knowledge, especially for the advanced users and security operations centers. It really goes deep into the details.
Is ESET interested in acquisitions?
The money we have, we have to earn ourselves. It’s not like somebody gives us money. So we have to be careful there.
But with introduction of Corporate Solutions (in 2022), the plan there is to boost the growth with well-selected acquisitions, whether this is on the technology side to complement the portfolio or on the business side to find the right partners, maybe those people to provide certain types of services that would complement what we can do.
There are some things in the works.
Do you have a message to the AI vendors on helping build trust in this emerging technology?
In a way, we are an AI vendor in our own space. So we are not really so much dependent on other vendors. We don’t look at them, apart from using some of those (neutral models) to train large language models just to get the vocabulary and basic knowledge.
This is going to be probably more and more and more difficult looking forward because the data is becoming more and more messy, and so the data created by generated AI’s feedback into the models.
A general comment on AI–like with fire, it is a good servant but a bad master.
That’s the problem with AI–few people understand what for the AI is, how it works, what are transformers.
People are influenced by the impression, by the marketing.
AI is very good at simulating humans. That’s the thing. It’s a simulation. It’s not human. It’s the difference between having an original Leonardo da Vinci painting and having a copy.
It might look almost the same, and it’s still beautiful. But it’s a fundamental difference because one is a true result of creativity. The other one is just mechanics, just statistics. That’s exactly the case with AI for cybersecurity. It is a powerful tool because it helps us to deal with data.
But just like calculators don’t replace mathematicians, AI is not replacing the cybersecurity team.
So how is ESET transforming in the AI era?
Humanity saw a lot of progress over the last couple of hundreds of years, and now in the last decades, probably even faster. And that was probably thanks to science and technology.
One of the basics of science is transparency, that you are showing what your invention is and why you believe it describes, objectively, reality and so on. And anyone can prove it or disprove it, try it and so on.
Now, with AI being developed by some of the biggest IT companies, you don’t have this transparency. It’s becoming more and more hidden what is behind it, and so then you cannot verify it.
For us, we’ve been in that field for more than two decades using AI for very simple things to very complicated, complex things.
We didn’t have the amount of data that we have right now thanks to systems like LiveGuard (ESET’s cloud-based threat defense product for threat prevention and detection).
We receive 700,000 suspicious samples a day. So from this perspective, having deep learning, using AI to categorize, to find similarities, that’s critical.
You don’t have that, you are lost. You can’t do things because it’s just too (much data to) do it by hand.
We have no reason to have any secrets. We have a white paper on our AI research, and we are happy to talk about it. Maybe not all the small details and those things that make us better than the competition.
