Elias Tsapsidis, General Manager at ESET Middle East, Greece, Cyprus & Malta, explains that ESET’s LEAP 2026 agenda centres on AI‑driven cybersecurity, partner enablement, protection against AI‑powered threats and aligning global innovation with Saudi Arabia’s accelerating digital transformation.
How is your organisation shaping the next wave of digital transformation at LEAP 2026, and what will be ESET’s highlight at the show this year?
ESET’s focus at LEAP 2026 is to position cybersecurity as an enabler of digital transformation. As Saudi Arabia accelerates cloud adoption, digital infrastructure and technology‑driven services, organisations need security that operates at the same speed and scale. ESET will spotlight the ESET PROTECT Platform, featuring AI‑native protection, XDR and next‑generation threat detection. The platform unifies prevention, detection, threat hunting and response to give security teams deeper visibility and more efficient incident handling. Visitors will also experience live demonstrations and engage directly with regional specialists. This approach aligns with the Kingdom’s ambition to build a resilient, trusted cyberspace that supports national growth.
Explain how your solutions leverage AI, automation, or agentic intelligence to solve real‑world challenges and deliver measurable business outcomes.
AI is fundamental to how ESET helps security teams convert massive telemetry into faster, more informed decisions. Across the ESET PROTECT Ecosystem, AI and automation enhance threat detection, event correlation, incident creation, investigation and remediation. ESET Inspect provides XDR‑level visibility and root‑cause analysis, while automated actions accelerate response. ESET AI Advisor adds generative AI to simplify investigations, enabling analysts to interpret incidents, understand complex attacks and generate summaries using natural language. This is especially valuable for organisations facing cybersecurity skills shortages. The result is faster investigation, reduced manual workload and quicker response, with ESET’s MDR service reporting an average response time of around six minutes. ESET’s agentic AI strategy emphasises supervised autonomy, strengthening human decision‑making while addressing risks introduced by AI agents.
Describe your partner strategy, enablement plans, and how distributors and resellers will help expand your market reach.
Saudi Arabia is a strategic growth market for ESET Middle East, and the channel ecosystem is central to expansion. ESET views distributors and resellers as an extension of its technical and customer‑facing capabilities. The partner strategy focuses on technical enablement, sales support and joint go‑to‑market initiatives, ensuring partners can understand customer requirements, position the right solutions and support evolving environments. This is reinforced by ESET’s global partner framework, including reseller and MSP programmes, technology alliances and formal product education through the Authorised Training Center and Education Portal. Strengthening local partner capabilities allows ESET to scale while maintaining high‑quality support and enables partners to build recurring cybersecurity services around XDR, threat intelligence, cloud protection and MDR.
Kindly share your strategy for addressing rising threats, securing AI systems, and embedding protection across your platforms and services.
The threat landscape is evolving rapidly as attackers adopt AI. ESET’s H1 2026 research analysed 900,000 AI skills, identifying 25,000 suspicious and 3,000 malicious, alongside a 108% rise in ClickFix detections and the discovery of PromptSpy, the first Android malware using generative AI at runtime. ESET’s response is multilayered: strengthening prevention, detection, XDR and threat intelligence across endpoints, cloud workloads and enterprise environments, while extending protection to the AI layer itself. In 2026, ESET introduced technology that inspects prompts and responses, detects malicious links and scripts, prevents confidential data leakage to public AI tools and provides visibility into AI usage. The AI Skills Checker analyses AI skills for hidden instructions, malicious code and risky behaviour. Looking ahead, ESET is developing a broader AI‑security architecture, including ESET Secure AI Relay, designed to operate between users, AI agents, business applications and AI models.
Outline how your offerings help customers modernise, optimise operations, and build resilience.
Modernisation often increases cybersecurity complexity as organisations operate endpoints, cloud workloads, applications and distributed infrastructure simultaneously. The ESET PROTECT Platform reduces this complexity by consolidating multiple capabilities into a cloud‑first environment. Customers can unify endpoint protection, XDR, vulnerability and patch management, threat hunting and automated response instead of managing siloed tools. ESET Inspect adds deep visibility, root‑cause analysis and contextual insights to support informed decision‑making. ESET’s 2026 portfolio extends protection into cloud environments through Cloud Workload Protection. Resilience is about anticipating threats, detecting abnormal activity quickly, containing incidents, recovering efficiently and maintaining continuity. By combining AI‑driven prevention, automation, XDR, global threat intelligence and human expertise, ESET helps organisations strengthen security while simplifying operations as Saudi entities expand digital services.
Discuss how participation at LEAP influences your expansion plans, customer engagement, and long‑term innovation agenda.
LEAP has become a key meeting point for organisations shaping Saudi Arabia’s technology landscape. For ESET, participation provides direct insight into customer priorities, partner needs, government initiatives and emerging innovation trends. These conversations influence both local market strategy and long‑term technology development. In Saudi Arabia, ESET continues investing in channel capabilities, partner development and joint market initiatives as part of its expansion in a strategic growth market. Customer discussions at LEAP also inform ESET’s global innovation agenda by highlighting how organisations adopt cloud, AI and distributed digital infrastructure. Globally, ESET’s innovation agenda is accelerating, supported by a €40 million AI investment programme covering foundational AI models, layered AI‑security architecture and next‑generation AI‑enabled SOC technologies, alongside plans to expand its R&D organisation to 1,000 researchers and engineers. LEAP connects global R&D momentum with the specific security needs of Saudi organisations and partners.
