Mark Kuhr’s session at the London summit gives security leaders a practical way to evaluate whether to build, buy or combine AI pentesting capabilities they can trust at scale
Mark Kuhr
LONDON, Sept. 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit – Synack, the AI + human penetration testing platform for continuous security validation, today announced that Mark Kuhr, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, will present at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, taking place September 22-24 in London, on how security teams can evaluate whether an AI pentesting capability is actually ready for production use.
Kuhr’s session, “Build or Buy AI Pentesting? 5 Tests for Production Readiness,” examines why an AI pentesting prototype that performs well in a lab or capture-the-flag benchmark often fails once it meets a live production environment, where authenticated workflows, custom business logic and a constantly shifting attack surface replace clean, bounded test conditions.
The session outlines five tests Kuhr argues security leaders should apply before trusting an AI pentesting system at scale: whether it can recover when a tool or attack path fails (orchestration), whether it can prove a finding is truly exploitable rather than merely plausible (exploit verification), whether it can operate within scope without disrupting production systems (safety), whether it holds up as underlying models change (model drift), and whether people can review, govern and scale it economically (human oversight). Attendees will leave with a practical scorecard for evaluating build, buy and hybrid options against their own environment.
“A proof of concept that solves a benchmark isn’t the same thing as a system you can trust in production,” said Mark Kuhr, CTO and co-founder of Synack. “AI pentesting systems need to verify findings, hold up as the environment changes, and put a person in the loop exactly where judgment matters.”
“Security teams are asking whether they can just build their own AI pentester,” said Angela Heindl-Schober, Chief Marketing Officer of Synack. “But a homegrown prototype and a production-ready system are not the same thing. These five tests give buyers a structured way to work through that decision before they commit, not after.”
The five tests Kuhr outlines reflect the same standard Synack applies to its own platform. Sara AI Pentesting is built to run continuously in production, not just perform in a lab, pairing agentic AI with the Synack Red Team, a vetted global community of security researchers who verify findings and apply judgment the system can’t replicate on its own.
Session Details
Kuhr’s session takes place Thursday, September 24 at 12:15 p.m. BST in the Show Floor Theatre at ExCeL London. Synack will also be exhibiting throughout the summit, which runs September 22-24. Learn more or book a meeting with the Synack team at event.synack.com/gartner-srm-2026-london, or view the full session listing on Gartner’s site.
About the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit
Gartner analysts will present the latest insights for security and risk management leaders at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summits, taking place September 22-24 in London. Follow news and updates from the conferences on X and LinkedIn using #GartnerSEC. Gartner is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
About Synack
Synack is the AI + human penetration testing platform for continuous security validation. Sara AI Pentesting combines agentic AI with the Synack Red Team, a rigorously vetted global community of security researchers, to expand testing coverage and prove real-world exploitability. The Synack Platform gives organizations control and visibility across testing activity, validated findings and remediation status. Synack supports point-in-time and continuous penetration testing across web applications, APIs, mobile applications, cloud and host infrastructure, internal environments and AI or LLM systems. Founded by former NSA operatives, Synack has enabled nearly 10 million hours of security testing to protect critical assets across enterprise, public-sector and highly regulated environments. Learn more at synack.com and on LinkedIn.
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