The agentic era: How Palo Alto Networks is turning security into a business enabler – News

For years, the relationship between cybersecurity and business innovation has been a zero-sum game. Security teams were the “Department of No,” tasked with slowing down adoption to ensure safety. Given the business pressure to get artificial intelligence deployed, the security industry has been trying to flip this script by rethinking security along platform lines.

With the launch of Prisma AIRS 3.0, a redefined Prisma Browser, and Next-Generation Trust Security or NGTS, as part of its RSAC payload, Palo Alto Networks Inc. is not just trying to provide agentic guardrails but help companies move faster and become a catalyst for innovation.

Typically, with new technology, companies crawl, walk and run. By integrating security into the agentic systems and workflows, business will have confidence to move forward faster leading them to the “run” phase significantly faster.

From ‘AI that talks’ to ‘AI that acts’

The industry is currently shifting from generative AI, meaning chatbots, to agentic AI — autonomous entities that don’t just answer questions but execute multistep workflows, from coding assistance to automated customer support. As Ian Swanson, vice president of product for AI security at Palo Alto Networks, noted during an analyst briefing, this shift from “AI that talks” to “AI that acts” introduces systemic risks. Organizations are currently “blind to what AI does,” even if they monitor what it says.

Prisma AIRS 3.0 closes this visibility gap. It provides a comprehensive platform to discover agents wherever they live — in the cloud, in software-as-a-service applications or on local endpoints via the pending Koi acquisition. By employing “AI red teaming” to simulate context-aware attacks and scanning agent artifacts for excessive permissions, Palo Alto is bringing a “shift-left” mentality to the AI supply chain.

The browser as the new command center

Perhaps the most pragmatic move is the evolution of the Prisma Browser. Since employees spend roughly 85% of their day in a browser, Palo Alto is turning it into the primary “Secure AI Workspace.”

The secure browser can now distinguish between human and non-human (agent) identities in real time. This solves a major compliance hurdle: accountability. If an agent issues an unauthorized $5,000 invoice, the system doesn’t just block it; it identifies whether the error was a human prompt or an autonomous agent going rogue. As Yonatan Gotlib, product manager for Prisma Browser, explained, embedding large language models directly into the browser with inline Data Loss Prevention or DLP ensures that “unintended actions” don’t lead to catastrophic data exposure.

This greatly improves threat protection as users often fall victim to browser-based phishing that can lead to stolen credentials and ransomware. No matter how much training a company does, expecting every user to catch every scam is unrealistic. The secure browser can “see” things users can’t and prevent users from doing things that will ultimately cause harm.

Solving the ‘cryptographic reset’

While AI grabs the headlines, Palo Alto is also addressing a looming operational nightmare: the “cryptographic reset.” By 2029, certificate lifespans will shrink from years to just 47 days. For an enterprise with 5,000 certificates, that means 106 renewals every single day — a manual impossibility.

The new NGTS platform, integrated with CyberArk’s machine identity intelligence, automates this lifecycle. Richu Channakeshava, product manager for quantum-safe security, emphasized that this isn’t only about better threat protection; it’s a resiliency play. By turning the network into a sensor that discovers “shadow” certificates and automatically refreshes them, Palo Alto is preventing the very outages that take business-critical applications offline.

The valuation perspective: Platformization and precision

From a company standpoint, Palo Alto’s strategy furthers its “platformization” push. By integrating these disparate technologies, AI security, browser-based work, and quantum-safe cryptography, into the Strata Cloud Manager, it is creating an ecosystem with immense gravity.

The company is leveraging what it calls “Precision AI” to keep latency low, a critical factor for agentic workflows that might involve 50 different “handoffs” between agents. By using smaller, deterministic language models rather than bulky LLMs for detection, Palo is keeping security fast (measuring latency in milliseconds) and cost-effective. When looking at valuation, this shift from a defensive cost center to an essential “secure growth engine” justifies a premium as the foundational infrastructure of the AI enterprise.

Over the past half-year, security companies seem to have fallen out of favor with investors, despite putting up strong numbers. As customers make security a core part of their AI deployments, this will create a “rising tide,” for all security platform vendors with Palo Alto benefitting disproportionately given they have the largest install base and the broadest platform.

What this means for the customer

The ultimate takeaway for the chief information security officer is a change in perception. Security is no longer the bottleneck.

• Business enabler: By securing the “agentic workspace,” leaders can now “greenlight strategic AI initiatives that were previously stalled” by risk concerns.
• Operational ROI: Automating certificate management via NGTS moves organizations toward “zero-touch automation,” significantly reducing the manual labor of information technology teams.
• Future-proofing: With its work on quantum-safe security, Palo is helping customers inventory their “cryptographic debt” and prepare for the post-quantum era before it becomes a crisis.

Final thoughts

Palo Alto Networks is betting that the winner of the AI race won’t be the company with the fastest agents or the newest models, but the one with the most trusted agents. By embedding security directly into the browser and the network layer, it’s ensuring that when a business moves at machine speed, it doesn’t fly off the proverbial guardrails.

It’s imperative that CISOs rethink their approach to security. The cobbling together of best-of-breed technologies has always been the norm but has never worked. In the agentic era, any delay or latency in agentic communications will cost companies real money and security is as important to success as graphics processing units or the network.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for News.

Photo: Palo Alto Networks