5 Big Takeaways From CrowdStrike’s 2026 Partner Summit

Top CrowdStrike executives including CEO George Kurtz, Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard and global alliances leader Amanda Adams spoke to partners in Las Vegas about massive AI-driven growth opportunities on CrowdStrike’s Falcon cybersecurity platform.

Right Technology, Right Partners

CrowdStrike sees solution and service provider partners as increasingly essential to putting the pieces together when it comes to securing the AI and agentic revolution, along with protecting against intensifying threats powered by the same LLM technologies, top CrowdStrike executives said during the cybersecurity giant’s 2026 Partner Summit Monday.

All of that translates to accelerating AI-driven growth opportunities on CrowdStrike’s Falcon cybersecurity platform, executives said during the event, which was held during the company’s Fal.Con 2026 conference in Las Vegas. The CrowdStrike Partner Summit drew hundreds of top partners and featured remarks from CrowdStrike executives including co-founder and CEO George Kurtz (pictured right), Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard (pictured left) and global alliances leader Amanda Adams.

When asked by Bernard if AI expands the role of CrowdStrike’s partner ecosystem, Kurtz said this is “absolutely” the case. “I think if you look at every technology shift, the partner ecosystem’s opportunity has expanded,” Kurtz said, pointing to prior security transitions including endpoint detection and response (EDR) and cloud security.

“We know, as a platform player, we obviously have tremendous capabilities—but we don’t do everything across every dimension of security. Nobody actually does that,” he said. “So, as a partner, you have to put the best pieces together. And customers really don’t want to be the general contractor. They want to buy a finished product. They don’t want to assemble this all themselves. They just want the outcome.”

That is only becoming more and more the case in the fast-moving agentic era, Kurtz said. “Technologies are coming and going,” he said. “I think what’s very durable is the platform—and the platform player like CrowdStrike—and then all of the adjacent services that can be put around it.”

And partners are pivotal to delivering these services, which can include AI readiness and governance—as well as deployment and management of AI and agents across a customer’s entire infrastructure, he said. Ultimately, when it comes to securing the AI and agentic boom, CrowdStrike sees itself in “the right position—with the right technology and the right partners—to be able to capture that value,” Kurtz said.

Partner Perspective

For cybersecurity powerhouse GuidePoint Security, strong growth in its CrowdStrike business and related services spurred by AI is already manifesting across its customer base, according to Mark Thornberry, senior vice president for partnerships at Herndon, Va.-based GuidePoint, No. 32 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2026.

In reality, “we’re still not that far along in the AI journey in the grand scheme of things. And just how much things have grown in the last 12 to 18 months is insane,” Thornberry said.

Ultimately, “as much as CrowdStrike has been doing with us [in the past], it’s now accelerating. We feel like the demand environment is there, and the numbers obviously prove that out,” he said. “We’ve got customers of all shapes and sizes that are really leaning into the Falcon platform.”

During the event, CrowdStrike executives also offered updates on how the company is aiming to enable partners to capitalize on the massive opportunities—including through launching its first AI partner specialization and the new Falcon IQ assessment tool.

Frontier AI Partnerships

Meanwhile, CrowdStrike also featured executives from frontier AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic onstage Monday in rare back-to-back appearances—highlighting the cybersecurity vendor’s close collaboration with both companies, Bernard said during the event. Crucially, for CrowdStrike, “we were ready for frontier AI when it knocked on the door,” he said.

Bernard pointed to CrowdStrike’s frontier AI security initiative, Project QuiltWorks, which was launched in April, just weeks after Anthropic disclosed details about its Claude Mythos model. CrowdStrike has increasingly been expanding the initiative to more partners since that point, he noted. In lockstep with the arrival of frontier AI models for cybersecurity, “we innovated,” Bernard told partners Monday. “You helped us innovate.”

What follows are five more big takeaways from CrowdStrike’s 2026 Partner Summit.

AI Security Could Be Bigger Than EDR

During CrowdStrike’s 2026 Partner Summit Monday, Kurtz predicted that securing AI agents could become a substantially larger opportunity than endpoint detection and response (EDR)—given the fact that the number of agents deployed by businesses is potentially unlimited. “I think it could be a much bigger opportunity than EDR [because] it’s unbounded,” he said. “You can have an unlimited number of agents that can be created.” Ultimately, “I think the amount of agents that we see today is just a small fraction of what we’re going to see in the future,” Kurtz said. “But you’re going to have to have some level of visibility, control and trust around those agents.” Notably, the surging adoption of AI has dramatically changed the way executives view cybersecurity, according to Kurtz. Instead of mainly being treated as a hindrance to leveraging new technology, “security—I think for the first time—has become the accelerator pedal rather than the brake pedal,” he said. “Instead of just saying ‘no, no, no,’ we can talk about how do we say ‘yes’ to actually accelerate what the business is doing.”

Falcon IQ Brings Partner Services Opportunities

CrowdStrike unveiled its new Falcon IQ offering Monday, which takes the assessment and sales methodology developed via Project QuiltWorks and turns it into a standardized tool for partners and customers, according to CrowdStrike executives. “What it does is, it takes the QuiltWorks methodology and it productizes it,” Bernard said during a briefing with media prior to the announcement Monday. Falcon IQ is initially available to members of the QuiltWorks coalition, with primary users expected to include global solution providers, systems integrators and distributors.

The agentic tool has been designed to analyze a customer’s Falcon environment and then automatically build a partner-branded remediation and services plan, according to executives. Using an API key, Falcon IQ evaluates the environment and produces an organizational risk score, along with pinpointing probable attack paths and a prioritized list of necessary fixes, CrowdStrike executives said.

CrowdStrike Launches First AI Partner Specialization

In conjunction with Partner Summit Monday, CrowdStrike launched its first-ever AI Partner Specialization in a bid to better enable partners around incorporating AI security into their advisory and services offerings. The AI Partner Specialization is “focused on delivering not only expertise but the incentives [and] certifications,” said Amanda Adams (pictured), senior vice president of global alliances at CrowdStrike.

Crucially, the specialization spans all of CrowdStrike’s existing routes to market with partners—sell, build, deliver and manage, Adams said. “However you engage with us, [CrowdStrike has] a track that is built for you,” she said. “We’re all on the same mission, and that’s securing the agentic AI future together.”

Close Ties With Frontier AI Labs

During the Partner Summit Monday, CrowdStrike highlighted its close relationships with the two leading frontier AI labs by bringing executives from OpenAI and Anthropic on stage, in a rare back-to-back appearance from the two intensely competitive AI platforms. The companies were represented by Farooq Sheikh (pictured right), who leads cyber and Codex go-to-market at OpenAI, and Ash Alhashim, who is cyber go-to-market lead at Anthropic. Referring to OpenAI and Anthropic, “I’m not sure if it’s ever been done before in the history of cybersecurity—for them to both be in the same room, at the same time, and be on the same stage,” Bernard (pictured left) said.

Without a doubt, the frontier AI labs need to work closely with cybersecurity vendors and their partner ecosystems to ensure increasingly powerful models benefit defenders, OpenAI’s Sheikh said. “We want to be the best partner to the cybersecurity ecosystem. We want to be the best partner to CrowdStrike. We want to be the best partner to defenders,” he said. “Let’s come together. Let’s make sure that every company has the tools, the access, the solutions that they need to defend themselves.”

Anthropic’s Alhashim said the dual-use nature of advanced AI models makes partnerships essential for the frontier AI labs. When it comes to “how we usher in transformational AI to humanity, we’ve got to get it right,” he said. “To do that, we’ve got to partner with like-minded companies, trusted partners—who not only share our values and our principles, but also complement our strengths in different ways.” Notably, Anthropic itself is a “big CrowdStrike customer,” he said. “We use CrowdStrike for a lot of things that we can’t do ourselves in-house. These models are great, but they don’t do everything at the end of the day.”

Making Partnerships ‘Agentic’

CrowdStrike is looking to bring agentic transformation to the way it collaborates with partners, as well, Bernard said during the Partner Summit Monday. “Products are becoming agentic. And what I believe—and what we’re here to talk about today—is that we want our partnerships, and how we work together, to become agentic as well,” Bernard said. The goal is to apply agentic capabilities across CrowdStrike’s partner efforts to make processes more efficient and accelerate growth, he said.

CrowdStrike has already been seeing surging growth in the channel, Bernard said. As just two examples, partner-sourced business is up 40 percent, year over year, while Falcon Flex subscription deals are up 127 percent from a year ago, he said. Ultimately, “these aren’t our stats—these are your stats,” Bernard told summit attendees. “Thank you for all the hard work you’ve put into that.”