Tanium CEO Dan Streetman sat down with Nasdaq’s Kristina Ayanian at RSAC 2026 to discuss how the company is redefining enterprise security and operations through Autonomous IT. Streetman outlined Tanium’s evolution beyond endpoint management into a broader platform that spans exposure management and security operations at scale.
It's a strategy that the market is embracing. He pointed to Tanium’s leadership position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for endpoint management tools and cited the strong customer outcomes highlighted in a Forrester Total Economic Impact report, which showed dramatic gains in remediation speed and rapid ROI.
What matters most to Tanium right now, he said, is helping organizations cope with rising threats and flat budgets by elevating IT and security teams through confidence-driven autonomy, with humans firmly in the loop.
Looking ahead, he sees a future shaped by agentic AI, deeper IT/OT convergence, and platforms that enable organizations of any size to operate more securely, efficiently, and strategically.
Full Transcript
Kristina Ayanian: Coming to you from RSA, I'm Kristina Ayanian from Nasdaq, and joining me is Dan Streetman, CEO of Tanium. Dan, thank you so much for joining me — welcome back!
Dan Streetman: Hey, Christina. Great to see you again, great to be here at RSA.
Kristina Ayanian: So since we last spoke at RSAC 2025, Tanium has positioned itself as an autonomous IT company. What does that mean in practice?
Dan Streetman: First and foremost, this really came from what we're hearing from our customers. We have been known and understood as delivering endpoint management and autonomous endpoint management, and as a matter of fact, analysts recognize that very,
very significantly. Just this quarter, Gartner released their endpoint management tools magic quadrant and we are the leader in that quadrant. So we continue to essentially set the pace for the industry in endpoint management.
But what we're hearing from our customers is, it's much more than that. It's endpoint management, it’s exposure management—understanding where my risks are—and it’s security operations at scale. Autonomous IT captures what we're doing for our customers. We're helping them operate free from disruption, be more efficient, be more connected across their IT enterprise and their security operations, and “Autonomous IT” captures that.
And the best part is helping them only be more efficient and more secure, but also save resources and time, and elevate their team members from the day to day “how do I work and manage endpoints” to how do I think far more broadly about how we are delivering IT operations and security operations across my whole enterprise?
Kristina Ayanian: So what is Autonomous IT?
Dan Streetman: That's a great question. And this is, I think, really important to understand. For years IT has been automated: I set up scripts. I understand if something happens I will do this. Autonomous is the ability to anticipate that change, to act and make that change, but then to assess what happened and learn from that.
So an autonomous IT system is actually learning from those actions and moving from maybe a small number of endpoints that you can understand and monitor to more. And at Tanium, we deliver a confidence score so you can understand what's happening and develop and increase your confidence in autonomous decision making.
So humans stay in the loop. But at the right point, humans can be above the loop and essentially, again, it elevates them from the menial tasks of having to observe everything to being able to look for the key indicators they want to see. And what autonomous IT does is free them up to be more strategic and less operational.
Kristina Ayanian: It's interesting, it's not just the technology, but you’re also taking a consultative approach.
Dan Streetman: Absolutely. So these are solutions. The whole idea here is that I have a unique platform that works very well with a few other strategic platforms, that gives me insights that I can’t get any other way. And that helps people elevate their roles, be more effective every day.
Kristina Ayanian: It seems like there's a heavy focus on R&D. You're listening to your customers — What are you seeing from your customers and partners and the broader market about this shift to autonomous it?
Dan Streetman: So it's a great point. At Tanium we continue to invest more in research and development, in terms of our revenue, than anybody in our space. And we're hearing great reception from our customers around what we're delivering in Autonomous IT.
We have customers who are managing hundreds of thousands and millions of endpoints.
We also have small customers who are managing a few thousand. They all need that same capability to understand what's happening in their enterprise at that moment, to be able to anticipate changes before they need to be made, to act and make those changes, and then to assess what happened.
We call that the autonomous IT confidence cycle, and we deliver a confidence score. So now customers don't have to worry, “if I make this change, what's going to happen?” Instead, they can see what happened and make that happen more quickly.
So that reception is phenomenal. I mentioned the Gartner report. We're also a leader in IDC’s endpoint report, So all of these lines are lining up with what our customers are saying, what analysts are saying, and the best part is, they’re saving money. Forrester just did a total economic impact report, and 95% improvement in mean time to remediation is significant for those customers that reported. That’s huge. So that also makes them 70% more productive. The best part about that is our customers reported and Forrester determined that essentially payback on Tanium happens in six months.
So that's really exciting when you can deploy, you can be more confident, you can have Autonomous IT, and you're getting payback in six months. It’s phenomenal.
Kristina Ayanian: That's amazing. Can you give me a success story as to how this has helped a customer?
Dan Streetman: Sure. A great example would be McDonald’s. McDonald's came to our Converge event and they had a breakout called the Autonomous State of a Restaurant, talking about how across millions of endpoints globally, McDonald's operations are more secure, they're more efficient and they’re better performing. It’s a phenomenal story. We love our engagement and work with them.
But they’re also part of a good example of all ends of the spectrum. There's a lot, millions of endpoints, but we also work with local school districts. The state of North Carolina was also at converge at the same time. They’re protecting municipalities and students, children. They're also saving money. So we're helping governments be more efficient, more secure, as well as large enterprises, places like McDonald’s. So it's a fun combination, and it’s a great place to be right now for Tanium.
Kristina Ayanian: That's amazing. It's really technology as a force for good.
Dan Streetman: Yeah. It's absolutely right. And you know, that means a lot to me. I started my career as a military officer. This to me is a fulfillment of all those aspects of it. We're delivering quality software, our customers are getting great benefits from that, and we're protecting citizens, team members, doctors in hospitals—it's a really wonderful way for us to serve.
Kristina Ayanian: That's amazing. Now, going off your point, there's a lot of concern over autonomy and AI replacing employees. How does this translate into the Autonomous IT space, and how are security teams overall going to shift?
Dan Streetman: So look, all we have to do is be here at RSA and hear the statistics. Attacks, threats, and risks are only going to increase, and they're all going to increase faster than budgets. So we don't think this is about replacing people. We think this is about elevating people, taking them out of the day-to-day decision toil, if you will, and instead giving them the ability to have an Autonomous IT cycle that helps their business be unstoppable.
Now, at the early stages, we think all organizations are going to keep humans very much in that loop. And at Tanium, we allow them to do that. But the best part is, with the Tanium confidence score, you can have humans increasingly above the loop.
One of the things we released this week is our Tanium Guardian Spotlight, which is the ability for IT operators and security folks to understand what agentic AI is doing in their enterprise. So whether it's the MCP or it’s actions on the endpoint, Tanium Guardian is the step where we are able to give them advice. Tanium Guardian Spotlight takes it to the next level in managing all aspects of managing the AI tools.
So we're very excited again that that innovation will continue.
Kristina Ayanian: So is Tanium a customer or user of Tanium?
Dan Streetman: Oh, absolutely. We are our best customer and user. We are also a customer of some of our partner solutions. So a good thing to understand is, we think any organization that goes to one single platform is probably creating one single point of failure. And we've unfortunately seen that in different places. We think the best strategies are going to be a platform of platforms, a few strategic, well-integrated solutions.
So for us, that is an example. We are great customers and great partners with Microsoft. We’ve been a partner of the year with Microsoft for three years in a row. They use Tanium to inform whether defenders are properly deployed. They use Tanium to inform Sentinel. We have several agents that are working alongside Microsoft. We do that internally at Tanium.
Likewise, ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a customer of Tanium. They use the real time insights from Tanium to make sure that ServiceNow CMDB is properly populated and if they make changes to see what’s happening, or to use Tanium to make those changes.
So that's a great example, we have those two partners at Tanium as customers, and we do the same with them, and it’s a great example of drinking our own champagne.
Kristina Ayanian: The partners and the numbers speak for themselves. As we're going through this shift, what differentiates Tanium from your peers?
Dan Streetman: So the critical pieces, we have a unique, patented, decentralized architecture that makes it very difficult for anyone to do what we do at the scale and speed that we do. It's unique, and that makes us a great partner to organizations that don't have those patents and capabilities. But it also makes us an essential platform to ensuring that Autonomous IT operations remain essentially ongoing and unstoppable.
Kristina Ayanian: It seems like you're always ahead of that next wave of innovation. Where are you focused on next?
Dan Streetman: So look, that's a great point. And it's one of the things that Tanium has always prided ourselves on: staying ahead of what's happening in the market. We were thinking about what's going to be happening in an AI-driven world well before other organizations were. And again, Tanium Guardian and Tanium Guardian Spotlight are great examples of how we're already prepared and already there.
What we see happening is two things. First, with Tanium and Tanium AI, we see organizations of all sizes being able to use Tanium increasingly effectively and easier. Our very first customers were departments of defense, large corporate organizations, financial services, large retailers—but now, as I said, we can support organizations of all sizes. So our leverage and use of AI with those core patents make Tanium very uniquely situated to support organizations of all sizes.
The other thing which we see happening is, clearly, IT and OT technologists come in together. So information technology and operations technology oftentimes are separate domains. And as they become more and more integrated, the ability to understand what's happening in my OT environment, the ability to make changes, do that all from a single console is something a lot of our customers are asking for. So I think those two vectors are really exciting for us from a growth perspective. We're able to serve more customers more efficiently, we're able to manage and protect more types of endpoints more broadly—those are really fun places to be.
Kristina Ayanian: The sky's the limit. Dan, It was great to have you again.
Dan Streetman: It's a real pleasure, wonderful being here. Thanks a lot, Kristina.