Conan O’Brien joins the fight against corporate AI scam attacks

Somewhere in your inbox, there’s a tedious cybersecurity training that you clicked through during your onboarding process and have likely forgotten about. To combat scam attacks and boring cybersecurity training, cybersecurity AI firm Adaptive Security partnered with comedian and Emmy-winning late-night host Conan O’Brien on a 15-video training series meant to help employees recognize and stop scam attacks. Filmed in Los Angeles and co-written by O’Brien’s media network Team Coco, the videos rely on the comedian’s trademark humor to keep watchers engaged on an alarming topic. “We try to make that training a lot more engaging, a lot more entertaining, to actually drive results rather than it just be something that someone sits through because it’s mandatory,” says Andrew Jones, Adaptive’s cofounder and chief product officer. Founded in 2024 by Jones and Brian Long, Adaptive works with more than 1,000 companies and raised more than $140 million from investors including startup investment funds from OpenAI and Nvidia, Bain Capital Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Adaptive hopes that O’Brien’s training modules will “meet the employee where they are” by helping them retain information about a threat that is only increasing with advances in AI. “Voice phishing, deepfake personas and AI-generated impersonation are hitting companies every week, and most training programs were built years before those attacks existed,” Long, Adaptive’s CEO, said in a press release. “We wanted to build something personal and engaging, something employees would actually look forward to.” As AI models get better and cheaper, Jones added that many companies are concerned that the attacks are going to get more sophisticated. “These attacks are increasingly more sophisticated than they were even six months ago or a year ago,” he told Fast Company. “When we talk to our customers, they’re all very worried about these attacks—particularly the attacks that are powered by AI.” These worries are not un