Blue Team at Machine Speed: Max Pollard (Cotool) on Agentic Defense

Max Pollard, CEO and co-founder of Cotool, joins us to talk about what it actually takes to let blue teams respond at machine speed. Cotool builds agents for detection and response, and Max walks through the crawl, walk, run progression his customers follow: start read only, route every consequential action to a human through an approval hook in Slack or Teams, count how often the agent was right, and only then loosen the leash. His honest read is that very few teams reach the run phase, because humans can't trust agents enough to take themselves out of the loop. We get into why the real blocker is less about trusting the model and more about data annotation, and whether the agent knows at runtime that the server it is about to contain powers a million dollars a day in transactions. Max also covers how Cotool scopes agents at the API endpoint level at config time, why the audit log has to record that an agent acted and on whose behalf even when no human prompted it, and how his team evaluates cost efficiency, instruction adherence, and behavior across 20, 30, or 40 agents running in production.