By:- Swapna Bapat, VP & Managing Director, India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks.
“AI has given cybersecurity something it has needed for a long time: leverage. Security teams have spent years contending with rising alert volumes, growing tool sprawl, increasingly complex environments, and constant pressure to respond faster. The challenge is not a lack of skill or commitment; it is that the problem has outgrown manual scale.
That is why AI deserves genuine appreciation from the cybersecurity industry. It is helping defenders identify patterns faster, reduce noise, automate repetitive work, and respond with greater speed and context.
At the same time, attackers are using AI to move faster too. That means the industry cannot afford to be tentative. We have to use AI to fight AI, secure machine identities and AI agents as seriously as human users, and move away from fragmented security architectures that make it harder to see, decide, and act quickly.
Cybersecurity has always been a race against time. AI gives defenders a better chance of keeping pace, and that is something the industry should genuinely appreciate.”