CrowdStrike is seeking to enable partners around AI-powered vulnerability discovery with its Project QuiltWorks initiative, Bernard, the company’s chief business officer, said Wednesday: ‘We want all of you to be a part of it.’
Even as a massive disruption to patch management practices is expected due to accelerated vulnerability discovery by powerful AI models, that is just one piece of the growing opportunity for solution and service providers around cybersecurity and AI, according to CrowdStrike Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard.
Addressing top CrowdStrike partners during the company’s Americas Partner Symposium 2026, Bernard said there is no question that an onslaught of software vulnerabilities is on its way that will need to be fixed with patches.
[Related: CrowdStrike President: ‘Huge Opportunity’ For Partners In Countdown To AI-Driven Vulnerability Surge]
Anthropic’s disclosure last month about its Claude Mythos model—and subsequent disclosures about other models from Anthropic and OpenAI—do suggest that “more vulnerabilities will be discovered in the next six months than were really discovered in the last 30 years,” he said Wednesday during the event in Miami Beach, Fla.
The best response, however, is undoubtedly to first “take a breath”—and then “have a plan,” Bernard said.
To help partners expedite their efforts to craft a plan for securing their end customers, CrowdStrike recently launched its Project QuiltWorks initiative, he noted. Project QuiltWorks brings together frontier AI models with Falcon Spotlight, CrowdStrike’s AI-powered vulnerability discovery offering, as well as with remediation guidance provided by systems integrators.
And while the cybersecurity giant has launched with large partners such as Accenture and Wipro, “we want all of you to be a part of it,” Bernard told partners Wednesday.
CrowdStrike intentionally didn’t choose the name “patchworks” for the initiative because that would overly focus on patching, he said.
While absolutely necessary, patching is “just phase one of AI’s disruption in cybersecurity and the outcomes of how you solve it,” Bernard said. “I think there’s going to be far-reaching and more interesting and important areas that we’re all going to have to work on together as AI continues disrupting [and] evolving the space.”
Thus, CrowdStrike “stuck with QuiltWorks—because you all are the quilt,” he told partners. “We’re all working together and forming this tapestry, if you will, of uniting the cybersecurity ecosystem to help the world embrace AI. That’s the big idea.”
For Presidio, No. 24 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, the first thing that the company is advising customers to do is to “take a breath” as Bernard recommended, said Justin Tibbs, vice president for cybersecurity at New York-based Presidio.
“The world is not falling apart today. There definitely is some time to figure out how we’re going to approach this,” Tibbs said.
And working with CrowdStrike—which is proving to be very much at the forefront of responding to the emergence of AI-powered vulnerability discovery—is going to be a key part of that strategy, he said.
“We’ve seen how fast they are running, especially with QuiltWorks being announced,” Tibbs said. “I immediately pinged the CrowdStrike team and said, ‘We need to be involved in this. We want to run with you.’”
Each type of partner will have a distinct role to play as part of that “quilt,” Bernard said during the keynote session Wednesday.
Solution providers, for instance, will be essential for turning module sales into “larger, outcome-based discussions” by enacting the QuiltWorks methodology, he said.
MSSPs, meanwhile, will have a huge role in “helping organizations of all sizes be able to understand what frontier AI models need, from a risk perspective—and just really taking care of it for the customer,” Bernard said.
Ultimately, “everyone is a part of this. It’s not a product launch. It’s really [about] industry mobilization,” he said.
“It takes all of us working together. It takes platform. It takes services,” Bernard said. “It takes partners, all of us, working as one to make a difference and help the world securely adopt AI.”
