Palo Alto CEO says CyberArk is in a “pole position” as AI agents take over

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora believes the cybersecurity industry is approaching a point where humans will no longer be able to keep up with the speed of the threats they are being asked to defend against. His answer is not to add more analysts or more security products, but to build systems that can increasingly detect, decide and respond on their own.

Speaking during Palo Alto Networks’ fourth-quarter earnings call, Arora described AI as a long-term tailwind for cybersecurity, but also outlined a more fundamental transformation in how security will have to work. As companies move from experimenting with large language models to deploying autonomous agents and specialized open-source models, he argued, the security infrastructure surrounding them will have to become increasingly unified and automated.

“Cybersecurity has to become less manual and more agentic and more done by us than the customers themselves,” Arora said.

His comments came as Palo Alto reported fourth-quarter revenue of $3.41 billion and forecast fiscal 2027 revenue of $14.1 billion to $14.2 billion. The company also announced the acquisition of Console, an AI-native platform that Arora said will allow customers to build agentic workflows in natural language that can automatically identify and remediate problems.