KnowBe4 has launched Defend for Google Workspace, extending its email and collaboration security portfolio to help organizations protect employees against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
The solution combines advanced threat detection, explainable AI verdicts and real-time employee coaching for Google Workspace users. Its multi-engine behavioral AI model is trained using KnowBe4’s proprietary telemetry of more than 1.15 billion daily event signals and 16 years of behavioral insights.
Defend for Google Workspace evaluates messages using multiple intent signals to identify threats such as business email compromise, zero-payload phishing and prompt injection attacks that may evade native security controls.
The platform also turns detected threats into real-time security learning. When a risky email is identified, the intended recipient receives a contextual teachable-moment notification, allowing organizations to strengthen employee awareness at the point of risk.
Once a malicious email variant is confirmed, Defend integrates with PhishER Plus to automatically search for, remove and neutralize matching threats across enterprise Gmail inboxes in under two minutes. This is designed to reduce the time required for security teams to contain widespread email threats.
KnowBe4 said its early adopter program processed 539,384 emails, intercepting 810 dangerous threats and 5,491 suspicious threats that had passed through native Google protections. The platform also classified 361,070 productivity-related emails, helping early adopters save an average of 10.96 hours each week.
The company says customer deployments have also demonstrated benefits in phishing awareness, threat triage and the remediation of complex business email compromise and calendar injection attacks.
Defend for Google Workspace will be available from September 15, 2026, to KnowBe4 customers using Google Workspace across small and medium-sized businesses, mid-market organizations and enterprises.
The launch highlights the growing focus on combining AI-powered threat detection with employee education and automated response to strengthen organizational cybersecurity.
