CrowdStrike has used its Fal.Con 2026 cybersecurity conference to announce a set of partnerships and platform developments that extend its Falcon platform across AI, identity, cloud, data and operational technology (OT). The vendor announcements reflect a shift in enterprise security priorities with direct implications for customer experience.
The systems supporting customer service are becoming more connected, automated and data-intensive, while cyber risk is increasingly moving at machine speed, changing the security brief for enterprise CX teams. Contact centers, customer-facing AI agents, customer relationship management (CRM) data, workforce identities, cloud platforms and the operational systems that fulfil customer requests can no longer be treated as separate security domains.
As Daniel Bernard, CrowdStrike’s Chief Business Officer, stated in the company’s announcement of an AI Partner Specialization:
“AI is reshaping the enterprise, creating an entirely new technology stack, operating model, and attack surface—and security must be foundational to all of it.”
The new specialization, introduced through the CrowdStrike Accelerate Partner Program, is designed to help partners build, resell, manage and deploy secured AI capabilities. It includes routes for partners to develop AI-powered agents using Charlotte AI AgentWorks and Falcon Foundry, then validate them through a new “Verified Agent” certification process.
AI agents are increasingly expected to retrieve account information, summarize interactions, recommend next actions and, in some cases, transact on a customer’s behalf. This expands the security question to whether the agent has the right identity, data access, permissions and escalation controls for the task it is performing.
CrowdStrike has launched Falcon IQ to address that challenge. Falcon IQ uses more than 50 AI agents to automate security assessment, prioritization and remediation workflows, correlating customer telemetry with threat intelligence and Falcon OverWatch findings.
The aim is to make security response faster and less manual as attackers use frontier AI to identify and exploit vulnerabilities.
The automation is tied to Project QuiltWorks, CrowdStrike’s broader ecosystem initiative to secure frontier AI risk. The company has expanded the initiative, bringing real-time data from partners including Abnormal AI, ExtraHop, HackerOne, Netskope, Rubrik and Zscaler into Falcon Next-Gen SIEM.
Project QuiltWorks is powered by frontier models, such as those from OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as open Nemotron models from NVIDIA, and combines CrowdStrike’s AI-driven vulnerability discovery and adversary-informed prioritization with remediation services from systems integrators, cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and financial protection from the cyber insurance industry.
Identity Verification Moves into Security Workflows
The goal is to improve security teams’ visibility across email, identity, cloud, data, network and exposure-management signals and automate actions when risk is detected. CrowdStrike said the use of its Falcon Onum data pipelines can reduce onboarding friction and storage costs by up to 50%.
Identity is central to this strategy. CrowdStrike also announced a partnership with CLEAR to integrate the CLEAR1 identity platform into Falcon. Under the arrangement, CLEAR1 can be triggered when Falcon detects risk, providing real-time, person-based verification through biometrics, government-issued identification and authoritative data sources.
This could be especially relevant for high-risk scenarios, such as a customer changing bank details, recovering an account, accessing sensitive records or completing a high-value transaction through a service channel. Traditional controls often establish confidence in a credential, device or account, whereas person-based verification seeks to establish confidence in the individual behind it.
The potential benefit for customer experience goes beyond stronger authentication, as it could reduce unnecessary friction for trusted customers while applying higher-assurance checks only when risk signals warrant them.
CrowdStrike has also widened the environments in which security and business data can be brought together, announcing a collaboration with Snowflake that will make the Falcon platform available through Snowflake Marketplace. The companies plan to enable federated search of Snowflake data from Falcon, so that investigation teams can access relevant context without moving data or switching tools.
This is relevant wherever customer data, interaction records and operational data sit in cloud data platforms. Security investigations often slow down when teams cannot connect the technical event with the customer or business context. Federated access could help security teams investigate with the right controls while preserving data location and governance requirements.
As customer-facing applications and AI workloads are deployed across multiple clouds and jurisdictions, CX organizations need confidence that they can protect sensitive customer data without undermining service performance, operating flexibility or regional compliance obligations.
To that end, CrowdStrike announced Falcon on Google Cloud, beginning on U.S. regional infrastructure, to support in-region data processing and help enterprises meet data-localization requirements. The companies plan to expand the collaboration to additional regions.
Finally, CrowdStrike has expanded its collaboration with Cognizant to bring Falcon for XIoT into managed operational technology (OT) cybersecurity services for manufacturing, energy and critical-infrastructure organizations. Outages to production, delivery and critical services are customer experience failures as much as operational ones. The partnership focuses on identifying assets, detecting threats and protecting converged IT and OT environments without disrupting operations.
Why AI Agents Have Changed Enterprise Security
The common thread across the announcements is that enterprise customer experience security is becoming an orchestration challenge.
During the company’s second quarter earnings call last week, CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz pointed to the “Mythos moment,” the launch of Anthropic’s frontier AI model, as “an inflection point in cybersecurity” that requires enterprises to take cybersecurity seriously.
“The world came to understand that cybersecurity is a necessity for AI adoption. New models created a new risk environment with no turning back,” Kurtz said.
Organizations need to connect identity assurance, AI governance, data visibility, cloud security and operational resilience without forcing customers or frontline staff through avoidable security friction.
As Frances Zelazny, General Manager of New Market Innovations at Prove told CX Today in a recent interview, enterprises must address “perimeter security, identity and data governance” as foundational requirements for an agentic operating model.
“Knowing who’s really behind the agent, who authorized the agent, who reauthorized the agent, obviously, intent is an important thing.”
For high-risk actions, agents should be subject to renewed authorization, Zelazny said. “There should be some re-permissioning with the agent… [and] the authentication should be a biometrically oriented authenticator. It shouldn’t be a PIN or a password.”
Security Must Be Built into the Customer Journey
The immediate action for CX leaders is to map where customer-facing AI agents, sensitive customer data and high-risk identity actions intersect. Then, alongside security teams, they should define which events require step-up verification, which systems need shared telemetry, and where human approval remains essential.
In the agentic era, a security checkpoint at the end of the journey will not be sufficient. Secure CX will depend on building trusted controls into the systems that make the journey possible.
