Zscaler extends Zero Trust platform to secure AI agents with new AI Broker and endpoint controls

Securing the AI workforce: Zscaler's zero-trust play for agentic AI

Securing the AI workforce: Zscaler's zero-trust play for agentic AI Since Zscaler Inc.'s launch, the company's mission has been to disrupt traditional access and security with its Zero Trust platform. At its user event, Zenith Live, in Las Vegas, the company made its case for what its next act would look like: becoming the foundational "zero trust for agentic AI" platform. For enterprises, the keynote by Chief Executive Jay Chaudhry (pictured) highlighted that securing artificial intelligence agents, including their connections, data paths and device footprint, is now a board-level architectural decision, not a bolt-on control, and that this will require a rethinking of security. Here are my top takeaways from Chaudhry's day 1 keynote at Zenith Live: Agentic AI as the new risk plane Throughout his keynote, Chaudhry framed agentic AI as the next major giga-wave after cloud and mobile, arriving faster and with fundamentally different risk characteristics. He warned that enterprises will soon face "dozens of AI agents for every employee," each running continuously, spawning other agents and autonomously accessing enterprise systems and data. "Agents don't take coffee breaks, they don't sleep and they can create more agents," he said, underscoring the shift from a human-centric to a machine-centric threat model. This shift reframes users as just one part of a much larger digital workforce, where agents may hold more privileges than people. Chaudhry argued that governance built for humans -- periodic certifications, training and manual approvals -- cannot keep pace with agents operating at machine speed and scale. "You can't rely on policies written for people when machines are making decisions in milliseconds," he told the audience, making the case for a new control plane grounded in identity, data and application context rather than in networks and IP addresses. Zero Trust Exchange evolves into an agent fabric A second major takeaway is that Zscaler is evolving its crown jewel, the Zero Trust Exchange, from a user-to-app fabric into an "agent fabric" that brokers interactions among users, workloads and AI agents. Zscaler's longstanding thesis holds that the internet can become your corporate network and that applications should be hidden behind a policy-driven exchange. This now extends to AI agents as first-class entities. "We always believed the internet should be your corporate network," Chaudhry reminded the audience. "Now we must treat every AI agent as an untrusted outsider, just as we do with every user." That continuity is strategically important for customers who have already standardized on Zscaler for Zero Trust and Security Service Edge. Rather than standing up a new, parallel "AI security stack," enterprises can onboard AI agents into the same fabric used today to connect users and applications. The platform can then enforce least-privilege access for agents, hide internal applications from direct exposure, and monitor all interactions for anomalous behavior. This positions Zscaler as a logical extension of the existing architecture, not a disruptive rip-and-replace solely to secure AI. AI Broker: From AI gateway to policy engine for agents On the product side, the most notable announcement is the Zscaler AI Broker, designed to sit between AI agents and the systems they access, including MCP-based agents and agent-to-agent interactions. With an integrated Agent Registry, the Broker tracks each agent's identity, purpose and permitted data and actions, enabling granular policies such as restricting financial agents to specific systems or limiting customer-support agents' access to personally identifiable information. This moves beyond the first generation of AI gateways, which focused largely on prompt filtering and model routing. Chaudhry positioned AI Broker as the control plane for an emerging agentic ecosystem rather than another inspection point. "We can't just watch what agents are doing; we must control what they are allowed to do from the very beginning," he said. For enterprises experimenting with internal orchestrators and AI frameworks, AI Broker offers a way to centralize governance, contain the blast radius, and demonstrate compliance to regulators by treating agents as highly privileged service accounts with continuous authorization. Endpoint AI Security: Taming shadow AI on devices Zscaler also addressed the growing reality that much AI experimentation occurs at the endpoint -- through browsers, extensions, local tools and plugins -- by introducing Endpoint AI Security. These capabilities extend Zscaler's reach into AI-related activity on endpoints, detecting and blocking behaviors such as malicious browser extensions acting as agents, unmanaged AI tools accessing sensitive files, and data exfiltration through AI assistants. Rather than becoming a traditional extended-detection-and-response provider, Zscaler is leveraging its existing visibility into encrypted traffic and software-as-a-service usage to correlate that visibility with endpoint-level AI behavior. The goal is to give organizations a way to rein in "shadow AI" without stifling innovation. As Chaudhry put it, "Your employees will use AI, whether you have a policy or not. The question is, will you have visibility and control?" Endpoint AI Security effectively closes a critical blind spot between the cloud security stack and endpoint agents, providing security teams with a unified view of how AI is used across browsers, devices and SaaS applications. AI Access Graph and AIGuardian: Turning telemetry into AI governance Finally, Zscaler introduced AI Access Graph, powered in part by its Symmetry Systems acquisition, to map how identities, data and applications connect across the enterprise. This data-centric graph can answer questions such as which users and agents can access a particular sensitive dataset and what access chain led to a specific AI action. For AI governance, this level of lineage and visibility is increasingly critical, especially as regulators and boards demand proof of who or what interacted with sensitive data and under which policies. AI Access Graph slots into the broader AI-Guardian initiative, which combines Zscaler's Zero Trust Everywhere framework, AI Broker, Endpoint AI Security and AI Access Graph, with consulting and integration support from global system integrators. This recognizes that securing agentic AI is as much an operating-model challenge as a technology challenge. "We see our customers as partners in this transformation," Chaudhry said. "Our job is not just to provide technology, but to give you a path to adopt AI safely and at scale." For large enterprises, this ecosystem approach may be the difference between staying stuck in pilot mode and confidently moving AI into production. Mythos creates a long-term tailwind for Zscaler Mythos wasn't addressed at length in the keynote, but I did ask Chaudhry about it during the analyst Q&A. Given the confusion around this, I felt it was worth getting Chaudhry's thoughts. He explained that Mythos creates a long-term tailwind because it validates the company's core thesis that eliminating the attack surface matters more than chasing every new vulnerability, especially in an era when frontier models can find and weaponize bugs at machine speed. The Mythos "SaaSpocalypse" narrative assumes that AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery is existential for SaaS security vendors, but Zscaler's model is structurally different from that of a typical exposed SaaS app. Its Zero Trust Exchange is designed to hide applications from the public internet, remove public IPs and open ports, and make users and workloads reachable only through identity and policy-driven connections. As Anthropic's Project Glasswing and the Claude Mythos leak have already shown, most catastrophic exposures trace back to misconfigured internet-facing services rather than sophisticated exploits. This directly supports Zscaler's message that "if you are reachable, you are breachable" and that shrinking what's reachable is the only sustainable response to AI-driven reconnaissance. By being an early Glasswing partner, feeding Mythos with rich telemetry from hundreds of billions of daily transactions, and using it to harden both its own stack and customers' attack surfaces, Zscaler can turn the same frontier AI that terrifies the market into a differentiator for its Zero Trust Everywhere architecture, reinforcing its relevance as AI makes legacy perimeter and VPN models obsolete. Final thoughts For chief information security officers and chief information officers, the key takeaway from Zenith Live is that AI security can no longer be deferred until projects "settle down." Chaudhry acknowledged that many organizations remain in pilot mode not because they lack AI ideas, but because they don't trust their ability to govern AI access to sensitive systems and data. By extending zero-trust principles to AI agents and anchoring them in a unified platform, Zscaler aims to give enterprises a credible path to move from experimentation to production with guardrails. I expect that as AI moves into the mainstream, the secure access service edge and SSE vendors will ride a rising tide that lifts most of them. It's critical that Zscaler and its peers clearly articulate their agentic AI strategies and how they integrate with or compete against emerging AI security fabrics. For enterprises, Zenith Live provides a blueprint: Converge user, app and agent connectivity on a single zero-trust fabric; treat AI agents as untrusted yet governable entities; and use data-centric visibility, not network topology, as the foundation of AI governance. In Chaudhry's words, "This is the kind of moment Zscaler was built for," and the company is clearly betting that securing the agentic future will define the next decade of cybersecurity. Though this is the kind of message one would expect from Zscaler's CEO, the reality is that information technology has continued to grow in complexity and security, and that environment is an order of magnitude more complicated. Zscaler's message has always been about shrinking the attack surface and limiting east-west traffic to minimize the blast radius of a breach. With AI coming, and coming fast, those basic principles can make the difference in security teams being able to keep up with the business or falling behind. Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Zscaler launches AI Broker and Endpoint AI Security for AI agents

Zscaler launches AI Broker and Endpoint AI Security for AI agents Zscaler Inc. today unveiled a set of products designed to secure autonomous artificial intelligence agents, with the cybersecurity company claiming it has built the industry's first complete zero-trust platform for agentic AI. Announced at the company's Zenith Live 2026 conference in Las Vegas, the new tools extend Zscaler's Zero Trust Exchange platform to cover how AI agents connect to networks, reach enterprise data and run on employee devices. They address a security model that Zscaler argues is breaking down as companies move from human users to software agents that act on their own. Autonomous agents operate at machine speed, spin up temporary identities, spawn sub-agents and exercise permissions in ways that tools built around known human users struggle to see or control, the company said. That creates gaps in visibility and governance that obscure agent risk and make data flows hard to track. At the center of the launch are two products. Zscaler AI Broker secures agent-to-agent and Model Context Protocol communications and ships with an agent registry that lets organizations define what each agent is permitted to access. Zscaler Endpoint AI Security targets AI threats on employee devices, reaching into browsers, extensions, plugins and local AI tools that the company said legacy endpoint products were not built to inspect. Zscaler also introduced AI Access Graph, a tool that maps how identities, applications and data sources connect across an organization so security teams can spot and cut unnecessary access. The technology comes from Zscaler's acquisition of Symmetry Systems Inc., a deal announced in May for $175 million. Symmetry built its business around mapping data access across human and nonhuman identities. The announcements build on Zscaler AI Protect, which launched in January. The company is adding the ability to discover embedded AI in software-as-a-service and internet traffic, identify agents and MCP servers running in public cloud and scan agentic codebases for risk. It's also expanding controls for sanctioned AI tools, with prompt extraction across more than 250 generative AI apps and support for the compliance application programming interfaces offered by Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC. For teams building AI applications, Zscaler is adding red teaming for MCP servers, a standalone prompt hardening service and compliance heat maps meant to strengthen governance across the development and runtime lifecycle. The push reflects a wider scramble among security vendors to wrap controls around agentic AI before enterprises deploy it at scale. Rivals including Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Google LLC have rolled out their own agent security offerings over the past year and Zscaler has spent recent months acquiring its way into the category, picking up browser security firm SquareX Ltd. in February. "Traditional security was never designed for millions of autonomous agents that act and reach sensitive data at machine speed," said founder and Chief Executive Jay Chaudhry. "We pioneered Zero Trust Exchange to secure users, branches and cloud workloads and now we are innovating to extend the zero-trust security to AI agents." Zscaler did not disclose pricing or general availability dates for the new products.

Zscaler Has 'Incredible Advantage' For Securing AI Agent Boom: Partners

The cybersecurity vendor's combination of a broad customer base and zero trust system that can be naturally extended into agentic mean massive growth opportunities ahead for Zscaler partners, solution and service provider executives tell CRN. Zscaler's large customer base, massive data telemetry and global system for securing communications between AI agents give the vendor a substantial edge when it comes to securing agentic adoption, executives at top Zscaler partners told CRN. During interviews at Zscaler's Zenith Live 2026 conference this week, solution and service provider executives said this combination puts the channel-friendly cybersecurity vendor in a pivotal position, with organizations racing to securely deploy AI agents. [Related: Zscaler CEO On Why Zero Trust Is The Real 'Foundation' For Deploying AI Agents] "I think they're incredibly well-positioned, and we're seeing it in the market," said Tristan Tarpinian, vice president for national alliances at Herndon, Va.-based GuidePoint Security, No. 32 on CRN's 2026 Solution Provider 500. Zscaler's AI security message has resonated strongly with partners and customers alike, particularly as businesses shift from experimentation with AI agents toward addressing critical questions around security and governance, partner executives said. Zscaler has a "significant lead" in the segment with its zero trust security platform, which is best equipped for protecting the communications needed to make agentic work, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry told CRN during the conference in Las Vegas. When it comes to enabling secure deployment of AI agents, the biggest need right now is to protect the communications between agents, Chaudhry said. And in that regard, "we think zero trust is the foundation on which agentic communication can be built," he said. "I think this will be massive." 'Same Fundamental Architecture' Zscaler estimates that it already had 70 percent of the functionality necessary to expand its Zero Trust Exchange into the sphere of AI agent communications, Chaudhry said. But while Zero Trust Exchange was designed for users and not for AI, "we think the same fundamental architecture and approach can be applied to agentic AI," said Matt De Vincentis, senior vice president for product marketing at Zscaler. "That means for customers, they don't have to deploy a whole new stack and new vendor ecosystem. It's just an extension of what they already know." Indeed, for Zscaler partners, the growth opportunities around securing agentic are bolstered by the fact that the company is already so deeply embedded within many customer environments, executives said. Whereas many vendors are still in the process of trying to gain credibility around AI security, Zscaler can build off of its large global deployments of technologies for securing communications between users, applications and workloads, according to Zscaler partners. Without a doubt, the relative novelty of AI agents means that existing customers are likely to be the "best targets for growth" when it comes to providing security around agentic, said Meg Smith, vice president for strategic security partnerships at Chicago-based AHEAD, No. 24 on CRN's 2026 Solution Provider 500. "I think Zscaler and their trusted relationships -- and the rate at which they've been innovating over the past two years -- is an incredible advantage that they have in the ecosystem," Smith said. 'Staying Power In The Market' Customers know they have to move fast in terms of deploying security in order to fully leverage AI agents and working with their trusted solution and service provider advisors as well as established vendors is going to be essential, Zscaler partner executives said. Around the industry, "all of these AI companies have a marketing tactic or their story. But it's about [having] real, applicable use cases within an organization," GuidePoint's Tarpinian said. And Zscaler is one of the few that can credibly say they have that, when it comes to having a system for securing agentic, she said. "I feel like they're a leader from that perspective," Tarpinian said. "It gives you confidence that they've really built something with staying power in the market. And they're relentless about it." Based on Zscaler's position in the market, it was a natural move for the company to expand into securing AI and agentic, said Josh Kirby, vice president for partner strategy and development at Denver-based Optiv Security, No. 29 on CRN's 2026 Solution Provider 500. Zscaler's data telemetry is clearly a huge differentiator that stems from its central position in the market, with the company enabling 750 billion transactions per day across its global systems, Kirby noted. "The amount of telemetry and the amount of data that they have access to, all of that plays a huge role in how you secure [agentic]," he said. 'Lead With Trust' Still, Zscaler's opportunity around AI will depend not only on the strength of the platform, but also on whether customers have the expertise needed to properly deploy and manage it, according to David Gottesman, president and CEO of San Francisco-based EpicCyber. And given that the rapid emergence of AI has created such a scramble across the business world, this need for working with specialized service providers becomes even more acute, Gottesman said. "Everyone's playing catch-up. This is a stampede," he said. "We're trying to figure out how to wrap our arms around it, but Zscaler is a great platform for that -- because everything goes through it when it's set up properly." Ultimately, for Zscaler and its partners, that means the AI agent security opportunity will be driven not just by technology -- but by whether customers have the right advisors and platforms in place, AHEAD's Smith said. When it comes to AI, she said, "I hands-down think that the most important thing that we do -- as technology enthusiasts, technology resellers, technology system integrators -- is that we lead with trust."

Zscaler CEO On Why Zero Trust Is The Real 'Foundation' For Deploying AI Agents

Crucially, when it comes to securing AI and agentic, 'we are putting a concerted effort to bring partners along in this journey -- because they will be needed,' Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry tells CRN. Even as countless vendors claim to have the ultimate solution to securing AI agents, Zscaler has a "significant lead" with its zero trust security platform -- which is, in fact, best equipped for protecting the communications needed to make agentic work, according to Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry. In an interview with CRN, Chaudhry said the largest need right now for enabling secure deployment of AI agents is to protect the communications between agents. And in that regard, "we think zero trust is the foundation on which agentic communication can be built," he said. [Related: Zscaler Doubles Down On Partner-Led Growth And Services Amid AI Boom: Channel Chief] Chaudhry spoke with CRN during Zscaler's Zenith Live 2026 conference in Las Vegas this week, where the security vendor unveiled its newest AI security capabilities while touting the proficiency of its Zero Trust Exchange platform for addressing AI-accelerated cyber risk. To move into the agentic space, Zscaler only had to deliver a modest addition of new capability on top of its existing policy engine for users and workloads, according to Chaudhry. "We already solved" most problems needed to secure agentic communication, he said. "We really had to do probably about 30 percent new work, and 70 percent we could leverage from what we have in place." And few if any other vendors would be able to provide such capabilities, backed by a global network of data centers, without far more investment of resources, Chaudhry said. Enabling every employee with multiple agents to boost their productivity "means the policies for those agents need to be able to run anywhere around the globe, wherever the employees are," he said. "We're already doing that en masse, in scale. We have infrastructure in place. We have the network connectivity in place. That [functionality] is not trivial to replicate." Meanwhile, Zscaler is taking a partner-driven approach to its push around AI security and enablement, including an increasing reliance on the channel for driving new growth and delivering services, Zscaler executives said this week. When it comes to securing AI and agentic, "partners have a big role to play here," Chaudhry said. "We are putting a concerted effort to bring partners along in this journey -- because they will be needed." Chaudhry also shared his latest thoughts on the potential impact of AI-powered vulnerability discovery, driven by frontier AI models such as Anthropic's Claude Mythos, as well as the company's expansion within the security operations (SecOps) segment. What follows is more of CRN's interview with Chaudhry. What are the major themes for you at Zenith Live this year? The adoption of AI is being slowed down by a lack of comfort and confidence by CIOs and CISOs. They're all trying it, testing it. They're under a lot of pressure from CEOs saying, "Come on, let's go." So they are working with us. There are many aspects of AI, but the biggest part is agentic communication -- agents being deployed. That's our biggest message. We think zero trust is the foundation on which agentic communication can be built. So, for us, it's natural to expand our Zero Trust Exchange to AI agents. It started with users, then we added workloads, we added branches, we added IoT devices. Nobody has anything like a common exchange that can say entity A can talk to entity B, based on some number of policy criteria. I think this will be massive. As far as your Exchange, do you feel like that puts Zscaler in a unique position? Exactly. And think of the scale. We already do scale. Our name stands for "Zenith of Scalability." Today we do about 750 billion transactions a day. To put that in perspective, there are 300 billion stars in our galaxy. There are 14 billion requests that happen on Google Search every day -- a massive volume. But AI agents will take that volume 50X, 100X. I think we are in a very good position to be able to go from here to there. So scale is a big part of it. The policy engine is already built for users and workloads. [For instance] this group of users have this group of applications [and] this group of agents can talk to this group of agents, or this group of applications. If you think about an agent, an agent is like a person, a digital worker. But an agent is code. It's like a workload. We already solved both of the problems. We really had to do probably about 30 percent new work, and 70 percent we could leverage from what we have in place. What was the new work [that we did]? Getting your MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) gateways. That's where the translation happens. Being able to figure out the next-level authorizations of these things, figuring out tools and skill sets. That linkage had to be built. Analyzing prompts for cyber DLP [data loss prevention] had to be done. So we've done all those pieces, and we are ready to go to market now. For this product, generally, we look for design partners and customers. And we like to keep that number somewhere in mid-to-high single digits. We had scores of customers who wanted to be part of the design. There's so much interest. As far as what you're seeing from other vendors, everybody is now saying they have "the thing" for agentic. Do you think that's getting exaggerated sometimes from other vendors? Yes, because everyone throws together a few things -- "here's my AI gateway" -- for example. As a basic starting point, you own an AI gateway simply by doing the MCP brokering function. That's very basic. Then the rest of the stuff, they need to figure it out. It needs infrastructure too, global infrastructure. These enterprises aren't going to run agents sitting in one office. Once a set of agents gets standardized, these agents work around the clock. Most of them get assigned to users. Fundamentally, they become truly digital workers and assistants. Where the world is headed, every employee has X number of agents that are helping you to make you more productive. That means the policies for those agents need to be able to run anywhere around the globe, wherever the employees are. We're already doing that en masse, in scale. We have infrastructure in place. We have the network connectivity in place. That [functionality] is not trivial to replicate. How do you see partners coming into play here? Partners have a big role to play here. What I'm describing -- the agentic communication -- is actually the more advanced stuff. The first part that every customer is actually deploying is what we call AI Protect. The No. 1 thing that starts with is, what do I have in my enterprise? Give me visibility. There are 200 companies that will give you visibility of this piece [or] this piece. If you want true visibility, there are four areas you must get. One is, what public AI applications are my people using? That's your Gemini and ChatGPT of the world. No. 2, all SaaS applications are becoming agentic. The agentic flows need to be tracked. Since internet traffic goes through us, we don't have to do anything. It's a matter of reporting against it. We had to understand the protocols and all, but nothing new [here]. Three, they want to understand what internal application services are using. They may be using Bedrock. They have model A or model B. We essentially scan through APIs, linked to GitHub and all. This piece came through the acquisition of SPLX. And four, what is on your endpoint? We have an agent sitting on the endpoint, where we can see what's on the endpoint. We have been giving basic visibility first -- do you have Claude Code, do you have Claude Cowork? But now, we enhanced it. We can not only see that -- we can see permissions and what it can do, what it can't do, and [we are] even able to enforce policy on the endpoint itself. Where we are headed is, you should be able to enforce policy. If it makes sense on the endpoint, do it on the endpoint. If it needs to be done in the cloud, do it in the cloud. How are you providing visibility in a way that meets the current needs? Our customers wanted visibility for all four things in a single dashboard. When you talk to an EDR company, they'll talk about AI visibility, but it's only on the endpoint. They have no way to get visibility into the traffic that's going to the internet, because they're not sitting on the traffic path. Our customers like that single pane of glass that can give them full visibility. Then, even the user is able to access applications. This is just based on policy -- marketing can only go to these five public AI applications. Engineering can go here. For that, we essentially enhanced our current exchange with prompt inspection. We have been offering that for quite some time. We have a number of happy customers. Then the red teaming came around. We built guardrails products. Guardrails [as a product] is very powerful. Guardrails essentially is sitting in front of your applications. It's intercepting traffic, analyzing prompts -- and telling you what's good, what's bad. We have done this solution at a very rapid pace. Eighty percent of the code in some of these new areas has been generated by agents. In terms of partner service opportunities, how have those been increasing? We launched a program called AI-Guardian. There are the older opportunities of zero trust. Then there's the newer opportunity of AI-Guardian. The services I just described to you -- from asset management to red teaming for vulnerability management and that type of stuff -- are made available to our partners today. They're actually participating in that -- because they need tools, and we have the technology. Customers don't fully understand what [the technology] is about, and partners can help quite a bit. And now Mythos is creating some other interesting challenges. Mythos actually will create more services. Think of it this way: companies already have lots of unremediated vulnerabilities. They don't have time and resources, but there was not enough concern. Now, Mythos brings some serious vulnerabilities. In fact, chaining even low-CVE vulnerabilities can become dangerous. So they need to be patched. And there is not enough time and resources. A number of customers I talked to, they're looking for partners or GSIs to be able to help them in that area. We are putting a concerted effort to bring partners along in this journey -- because they will be needed. You'll see us training more and more of these partners to provide those services [such as in AI-Guardian]. They're a very important piece. Has anything changed, even just in the past few weeks, from your conversations about Mythos and the risk there? Literally every board is asking for a weekly or [an] every-two-weeks presentation of what progress they made. We have a few hundred very active engagements with large customers, helping them. Everyone thinks that Mythos is about patching and fixing stuff. That's only one part of it. For us, the highest-impact security [action] about Mythos is hiding your application behind our exchange. Then once you roll out zero trust, then the lateral movement goes away. So even if an employee gets compromised, that malware can't just go around. One of the things companies are trying to figure out is, when does Mythos actually get out? They're worried that as soon as it gets out, lots of people will get their hands on it. Anthropic has not been very clear. [But] we need to get ready. I do believe there'll be more breaches with this [technology] coming. And it's not just Mythos. Other models are also maturing pretty rapidly. Do you believe attackers are going to find a way to use it, one way or another? There are so many models. They're all catching up with the best. So we can't just depend upon patching. We need to do other things. By hiding applications, you're preventing breach. By doing zero trust, you are minimizing the blast radius and impact. All those things should be done in parallel. And partners can play an important role. You offer an expanded set of products now compared to even just a few years back -- does that lead to a greater service opportunity for partners? Absolutely. And we have SecOps, which requires lots of services, as well. Even data security requires lots of services. There's always data classification, all the tagging. All of this becomes important. So there is plenty of room for services. I think partners who get focused and build a practice are successful. Partners who are more opportunistic -- they never get there. Things are moving so fast. There are not enough resources. If partners can be nimble and get their people trained on the newer things, customers need help. The No. 1 reason to acquire Red Canary was they had built some very good, very sophisticated agentic technology. And No. 2, they had SecOps expertise because they have been running security operations for companies. Those two things are helping us. [Now we are] combining Red Canary technology with Zscaler technology. It has helped us accelerate [in SecOps]. Our customers are finding it very attractive. Customers are saying, "I no longer need to send Zscaler logs, which are massive, to another source" -- because it costs time and money to do that. We can show them value right there, from our source itself. That's the first step for us. Red Canary [and Zscaler] essentially will have one solution. Older solutions will get phased out. We want to move the customers over to a single, richer solution. Are there certain other trends you are keeping an eye on? AI has moved pretty rapidly. The two aspects, when we think of AI -- one is, how do we secure the AI application infrastructure? This is where our guardrails and our AI Protect largely comes in. Then the second part is, how do we use AI for everything else? So now, most of our data security is being done with AI -- the classification is done with AI. The old way of doing classification is going away. More and more threat detection, even inline, is being done through AI. So we are embedding AI in all of our products and services, because this makes them more effective. Having an early start with "zero trust everywhere," I think, is going to be our biggest advantage. I just came from meeting with a customer. He said, "When you already are our Zero Trust Exchange for us, it's natural for you to be the exchange for agents, as well." So I think a lot of functionality will evolve and will be added in the agentic communication space. Identity is fragmented. Our goal is to be the Switzerland. I don't need to create identity. I can take identity from Microsoft, from Google, from AWS, whoever -- and do identity authorization and some of the checks, and connect the right party to the right party. Everyone is going to talk about control planes, but you're not going to have control planes from three hyperscalers. They may have that, at their application level, within the application. But when it comes to [protecting communications] across applications and across companies, we are extremely well-positioned. Do you think we're entering an era where it will be hard for startups to really compete with big players like Zscaler? I think they'll get acquired if they do a good job. Let's look at Symmetry Systems. They solved a very hard problem over the past six years. We acquired some technology because it saves me 10 months or 12 months. But with Symmetry, there is not a lot of expertise out there to solve the Symmetry problem. A bunch of Ph.Ds. solved this hard problem. So we got it for talent and technology. That is very important. This is a need we anticipated. Even though today, people don't think they need it for agent communication. But we know that when so many agents [are deployed], they'll spawn further agents. Who is talking to who? The access graph is the best way to figure that out. I look at the barrier to entry -- who is the competition coming from? Especially for the inline communication or agentic [capabilities]. I think we have a significant lead. And with the global infrastructure we've got in place, we're pretty well-positioned.

Zscaler Unveils New Product Innovations to Secure Agentic AI

Delivers Industry's First Complete Zero Trust Platform for Agentic AI with Comprehensive Protection for How Agents Access Data, Interact with Systems, and Operate Across the Enterprise Zscaler, Inc. today announced major innovations to extend the Zscaler Zero Trust ExchangeTM platform to secure AI Agents-how they connect, access data, and run on devices. With these innovations, Zscaler is delivering the industry's first complete Zero Trust platform for Agentic AI. Today, enterprise security is undergoing a shift from human users to autonomous agents. Traditional security tools were designed around known human identities and predictable access patterns. Autonomous AI agents change that model. They operate on a user's behalf as well as autonomously and at machine speed, creating ephemeral identities, spawning sub-agents and tasks, and exercising permissions in ways that traditional security tools cannot fully see or control. While they can deliver significant efficiency gains, AI agents also introduce new gaps in visibility, access, and governance, obscuring agent risk and making data flows difficult to track at scale. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in software development, endpoints are also increasingly exposed to malicious agents, tools, and plugins that many legacy endpoint security solutions were not designed to detect. To help companies adopt agentic AI more securely, Zscaler is introducing the next evolution of its Zero Trust Exchange with new solutions that expand protections across the AI ecosystem - helping organizations put agentic AI to work with stronger security and greater confidence. These include two key advances: · Zscaler AI Broker helps secure agentic communications through MCP and A2A brokers. With an integrated Agent Registry, it helps organizations understand what each agent is allowed to access and apply fine-grained access across enterprise AI agents. · Zscaler Endpoint AI Security helps customers find and stop AI-related threats on employee devices, including risks hidden in browsers, plugins, extensions, and local AI tools. This capability reaches into the browser, extension, and plugin layers that traditional endpoint security tools miss. Now Zscaler can enforce policies to secure AI everywhere including endpoint and cloud. Introducing Zscaler AI Access Graph: Connecting the dots of Data and Identity lineage with AI for enhanced security and governance of Agentic AI An important element of agentic security is understanding which agents, users, and identities are communicating with which models, applications, and data sources. Powered by Zscaler's recent acquisition of Symmetry Systems, Zscaler AI Access Graph maps how identities, applications, and other data sources connect across the enterprise. The integration of this technology with Zscaler's Zero Trust Exchange enables organizations to understand and then enforce policies, reduce unnecessary access and risk, and track data lineage in real-time across every channel. Building on Zscaler AI Protect launched in January 2026, Zscaler is also delivering major new enhancements across AI Protect's three core use cases: · AI Asset Management (visibility into AI assets, usage, and risk) gains new capabilities to discover embedded AI in SaaS and internet traffic, identify AI agents and MCP servers in public cloud environments, uncover risks in agentic codebases through code scanning, and extend visibility to AI activity on endpoints. · Secure Access to AI (safe, governed access to sanctioned AI tools) expands controls for AI interactions with prompt extraction across more than 250 GenAI apps and adds full conversational views, support for Anthropic and OpenAI Compliance APIs, and intent-based guardrails for multi-turn conversations. · Secure AI Infrastructure and Apps (protection for AI apps across the development and runtime lifecycle) introduces AI red teaming for MCP servers, a standalone prompt hardening service, and compliance heat maps to strengthen AI governance. "Traditional security was never designed for millions of autonomous agents that act and reach sensitive data at machine speed," said Jay Chaudhry, Chairman and CEO of Zscaler. "We pioneered Zero Trust Exchange to secure users, branches and cloud workloads and now we are innovating to extend the Zero Trust security to AI Agents. Now Enterprises are not held back from rolling out agents everywhere". "Managing data security is no longer just about building high walls; it is about scaling visibility and treating data as a highly active, strategic asset," said John Israel, Global CISO at KPMG, who joined Zscaler as a guest speaker to discuss the launch. "As businesses scale their use of AI agents to optimize operations, having a unified, zero-trust framework to trace data lineage and govern agent-to-agent interactions is paramount to maintaining trust, compliance, and competitive advantage." Together, these innovations deliver a comprehensive framework for securing agentic AI - built on Zscaler's Zero Trust Exchange platform to protect enterprises today and into the future. By safeguarding agents with comprehensive security controls, organizations can now accelerate their AI adoption with confidence.

Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry: Boldest Statements From Zenith Live 2026

When it comes to the push for enabling secure usage of AI and agents, 'this is the kind of moment Zscaler was built for,' Chaudhry said during the company's conference. As the AI era continues to ramp up, many of the traditional assumptions of business -- whether it's around cybersecurity or around how to enable employee productivity -- are quickly going out the window, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry said Tuesday. During his keynote at Zscaler's Zenith Live 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Chaudhry said that while users have long been considered the biggest risk in security, AI agents are rapidly becoming the "weakest link." [Related: Zscaler CEO On Vulnerability Surge From AI: 'We All Need To Be Paranoid'] Ultimately, Zscaler believes that its zero trust security platform is ideally positioned to address the huge needs organizations are facing in this fast-changing AI environment, he said. When it comes to the push for enabling secure usage of AI and agents, "this is the kind of moment Zscaler was built for," Chaudhry said. At the same time, Zscaler is aggressively expanding its platform to meet evolving demands, he said, including with the unveiling Tuesday of new products for AI broker, endpoint AI security and AI access graph. The Zscaler CEO also recognized partners Tuesday for the key role they are playing in making it possible to "drive transformation" in the way required by emerging AI capabilities. "Our partners have been a very important part of this journey," Chaudhry said. "They have been working together with Zscaler to help [customers] transform your applications, transform your network, transform your security." What follows are Chaudhry's five boldest statements from Zenith Live 2026.