AI Impact Summit 2026: Exclusive Interview with Jay Chaudhary, CEO, Chairman & Founder of Zscaler

Thank you. I'm glad to have this discussion.

It's massive. It's big. No matter which direction you go to, there's lots and lots of people enjoying. I've been to a few sessions. I did a keynote this morning. It's great to see people are looking forward to learning and participating in it. It's wonderful.

You know, in old days before digital, all the threats used to be physical. Somebody will break into your house. Now every business is happening online. India has become digital. The world has become digital. So it's natural for bad guys to come after the digital world. They want a piece of action without working hard. So it's not surprising that people are trying to do this. And every new technology comes in, it offers a positive side, it offers a negative side. That means the same technology can be abused. AI is wonderful but AI is dangerous. It's becoming easier to attack, to breach using AI, but companies like Zscaler are using AI to catch the bad guys before they really break in or if they break in to find them and isolate them. So it's a race with bad guys and our job is to stay ahead and keep all these businesses safe.

I think it's a wonderful approach because in the other world where AI is dominated by a few companies and only the smaller number of people will benefit from it, which is not good for mankind. So having inclusive approach, that means making AI available to the masses, to broader set of companies, it's a good thing. I mean India has done some of the things in technology that are kind of good examples from before. When Aadhaar was built, UPI was built, all those systems democratized how payments can be done. Similarly, I think as the government sets the foundational pieces underneath and promotes and makes easier, so more companies can participate in it, more people can participate in it. So it's a wonderful idea.

So we at Zscaler see a lot of data that our customer use out there. So India actually in the use of AI actually shows up one or two even ahead of the survey talks. But the survey's view of third is, I'm sure they put US and China as one and two and India is right behind it and that's based on the amount of work done in creating foundational models. I think India has tons of talent, tons of potential to catch up or get ahead. And also you don't have to build large language models for everything. Large language models are wonderful because you can ask them any questions, for layman they're pretty exciting but in the real world you need domain-specific language models, a language model for agriculture that's trained and specialized in that. So those are the type of models India is focused on. I was in Davos having some conversations in some of the meetings that our IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had. I mean he talked about many of the domain-specific models India is building. I think that's a very good approach and with this India can actually get ahead. AI can really help automate many of the systems, it can catch bad things quickly. So I think the push this AI Impact Summit is doing for India, it's a wonderful thing.