AI驱动下的网络安全未来：创业者的AI安全愿景

Al-future of Cybersecurity: An entrepreneur's Al security vision Al-driven budget expansion and demand, we were fortunate to host Amol Mathur, cyberentrepreneur and recent Palo Alto executive (head of their Cloud and Al businesses),foradiscussionon the outlook andopportunity.We reallyappreciate Amol'sperspective,givenhisdeepexperienceworkingonleadingproductattopcybercompanies-20+yearsspanningcloud security,data securityapplication security,endpointsecurity,andsecurityoperations. He has held leadership roles at McAfee, Akamai, IBM,and most recently PaloAltoNetworks,wherehehelpedleadCloudandAlinitiatives.AND inmanyways,what wasmost intriguing to us is he chose NOW as the time to jump into an entrepreneurial venturewhen he could have kept the cushy executive roles. In the back of our mind was a keyquestion: what is it that he's seeing that caused him to take on the risk of being a Founder. +19173448390peter.weed@bernsteinsg.com +1917344 8463armin.hadavi@bernsteinsg.com +1917344 8342luwei.yang@bernsteinsg.com Why now? Al is the most significant cybersecurity shift in decades,and Amol seesmassivegreenfield for startups.He thinks Al is creating a new attack surfacethatneeds a new generation of security products.This is a greenfield with no establishedincumbents-aripeopportunitytofoundacompanytosecureAlagents.Thekeydynamicsallowing startups to succeed vs.established vendors really come downto a coupleparts.First, a belief that a new Al security buying center will emerge. And second, independent"Switzerland”Al Agent cybersecurity willbeadvantaged vs.established vendors.In thesetypes of market conditions the history shows new startups often win and becomethe futuregiants. He sees a path to get there! NewAl-cyberbuyermayemerge,positioningstartups toservethemnatively.Unlikewell-defined,buyers arecurrentlyrapidlydeployingAl underboard-levelmandates whilesecurity teams are still trying to understand the associated risks. It means the CiSO istapping teammemberstolookatthisproblemon a stand-alonebasis,and notthrough oneof the existing cyber pillars.This may set up naturally to become a new buying center. "Switzerland"startups maybewell positionedvs.vendorswithin existing pillars.Amol points out that attacks increasingly span endpoints,cloud environments, identities,applications,and Alsystems,makingdata aggregationand contextmore importantthanany individual security product. He believes new winning cybersecurity vendors will collect,correlate,and analyzedata across currentcyber pillars to produce high-confidenceoutcomes.He also highlightedthe emergence of Al-native SoC platforms and the shifttoward separating security analytics from underlying SIEM or cyber data lakes. What may be the new Al-cyber category? Securing Alagents and agentic workflows. He distinguished between "securing with Al" (using Al to improve existingsecurity product and operations performance)and"securing Al"(protecting Alsystemsthemselves). His view is that Al Agents introduce a fundamentally new threat modelbecausetheyaretrusted systems whosebehavioris influencedbyprompts,context,andexternal data.As a result, agent security,agent identity,and understanding agent intent arelikelytobecomemajornewcybersecuritycategoriesoverthenextseveralyears.Startupsmay capturea significant portionof thisvalue, inhis mind(and wefoundthisconsistentwithour CisO interviews and survey where startups are being considered broadly). The discussion tends to support our previously expressed thesis that during the emergence of newtechnicalarchitectures andbuyersthat existing vendors may receiveamore limitedportionof theupside.When asked aboutwhatmakes it easierfora startup to realizetheupside,he emphasized boththe advantageof anew"Switzerland"that looksacross existing cyber vendors'pillars/platforms and that the newbuyers in enterprises often prefer a new best-of-breedoffering. On both these counts he also went deeper in our discussion,pointing out his experience with what we think is theclassic"innovators dilemma"-the existing priorities and investments makeit hard for an incumbent to build a winning offeringgiven all the other priorities they have, have a clean story relative to their current platform, and access the new buyers with thecurrent commercial team. Net net: we are watching for startups in"Al for cybersecurity" and"Securing Al" that could emerge and become winners. Thecategory leader(s)may become standalone and public, while their trailing competitorsmay be acquiredby large incumbentplatforms and vendors looking for a toehold in the gold rush. PleasereadourrecentnotesforperspectivesonCybersecurityinvestmentimplicationsforQ2earningsand H2overall inourrecentnotes: .Cybersecurity:Off-cyclereadthroughfromearningsthus farCybersecurity:mid-'26 CiSO conference calltranscript covering budget trends and priorities+Al-impact.CybersecurityMid-'26CISO survey:Al-drivendemand continues!:GrowthSoftware&Cyber: H2'26 outlookflips the script??? The discission was broad,