About Jagtar Chaudhry
Jay Chaudhry, co-founder and CEO of Zscaler, has been discussing the cybersecurity implications of artificial intelligence, particularly the rise of AI agents and the impact of Anthropic's Mythos vulnerability-finding model. He described AI as a "giga wave" and argued that traditional security models based on firewalls and VPNs are outdated, advocating instead for a zero-trust architecture in which applications are hidden behind an exchange. Chaudhry stated that AI agents, which he said could number between 50 and 100 per user, represent a new security risk because they "act in milliseconds" and "take no break, no weekends, no sleep." He characterized Mythos as "powerful" but suggested its launch involved "a little bit of marketing mystique," and said that while it finds vulnerabilities at a record pace, the greater challenge is that organizations cannot patch all of them.
On Zscaler's financial performance, Chaudhry noted that the company reported 25% revenue growth in its third fiscal quarter of 2026 and crossed $3.5 billion in market capitalization. He attributed a subsequent 28% stock decline to a "misunderstood" comment about new customer acquisition, and said the company expects total ARR and revenue growth of 16 to 17% for fiscal 2027. Chaudhry also announced the intent to acquire Symmetry Systems, a company that provides an access graph mapping identity and data connections, and said Zscaler is partnering with Microsoft, Google, and AWS for agent identity rather than building its own solution. He described AI and frontier models like Mythos as "one of the strongest tailwinds our business has ever seen."
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Jagtar Chaudhry's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Kelly Evans0:01
Drop ever following earnings a few weeks ago. The company now announcing new AI security products at its Zenith Live conference earlier today. That's where we find our own John Fortt, along with the CEO of Zscaler, for a CNBC exclusive. Hi, John.
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John Fortt0:17
Hey, Kelly. Thank you very much. Jay Chaudhry for having us here at Zenith Live. And it's not just a busy day. It's a busy time in software. The whole software index is down about 3.5% today. You guys reported earnings recently. There's a big shift happening with agentic AI. And you guys are announcing some security that addresses that. Why is that important?
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Jagtar Chaudhry0:43
Everyone is excited about embracing AI, but all CIOs and CISOs are worried about how can they embrace it securely without causing issues such as data loss. So the best approach to have secure communication among agents or agents through applications is to have an exchange technology that we pioneered. We call it zero trust security, which says this group of agents can only access this group of applications. That's a big deal. We got lots and lots of customers waiting for this technology so they can start rolling out their agent solutions.
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John Fortt1:20
Let's talk about the crosscurrents that are happening in technology right now. A big part of this year has been defined by this demand for memory chips. We've seen some of the companies benefiting from that shooting up dramatically. But then you guys have infrastructure as part of your play and how you plan to secure the AI enterprise. And so that memory chip crunch is actually affecting you. How?
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Jagtar Chaudhry1:46
So we got Zscaler infrastructure deployed in 160 locations around the globe. The traffic of our customers comes to us. We are like a check post. We check A, B, C if this is good, we're allowed to go and obviously don't. So as the cost of memory and processes is going up, it does impact us. But it's a very manageable stuff. If we were shipping thousands of boxes like firewall companies do, it'll be a big impact. It has some impact on us, but not in a meaningful way.
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John Fortt2:19
Now, why is this an important long term play for you, a differentiator for you to have this investment in infrastructure, and especially putting that in the context of what you believe is the increased pace of needing to deal with these threats in the agentic AI era.
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Jagtar Chaudhry2:37
Traditionally, security has been done using firewalls and VPNs, so either those boxes are shipped to customers or those pieces of software run in the cloud. But either way, it's a very old model with 30 year old architecture.
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John Fortt2:51
Firewalls, just keeping the bad guys out.
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Jagtar Chaudhry2:54
Right. It's a moat. Yeah, this is good. This is bad. But in today's world, who is in? Who is out? Everyone is everywhere. And agents will be running from various locations. So Zscaler model was don't worry about in and out. Everyone is untrusted. Your agents are untrusted, your users are untrusted. They come to our exchange. We validate who you are and only connect you to the right application, right service. This is the modern architecture. We pioneered it and we have over 50 million users from over 45% of Fortune 500 companies who use it today. We're simply extending that architecture to include agents. So now agents can do the same stuff. It's just that agents are much harder today. A user is the weakest link. Tomorrow, agents will be the weakest link. Agents run at machine speed. The numbers grow big time. They need no break, no sleep. So with this architecture, you need to be able to scale to take a lot more traffic.
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John Fortt3:57
Here's the challenge, I think, for software investors, technology investors today, and I liken it to 25 years ago when we first had the .com revolution. Taking off the internet and embracing the web was going to destroy some companies, but it was also going to upend some business models. And when you see stocks, stock prices go down, that could mean this company is getting disrupted. It could mean this company is being underestimated. In the case of, I'm trying to think of one that got completely disrupted, but Amazon was completely underestimated. The idea that it was building up this infrastructure that was going to benefit it in the future. Yes. When you look at OpenAI, Anthropic going public, what is the effect on your business as this money is pouring into these model creators, these LLMs, and creating this world that we're going to have to live in.
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Jagtar Chaudhry4:52
So model companies going public is a good thing. It's a tailwind for us because as these models are maturing, enterprises can use more and more agentic applications. More adoption of agentic technology means more need for cybersecurity. That's where we come in. There is old school cyber companies, there are new school cyber companies. Old school, firewall-based stuff is not going to work. We pioneered zero trust. Every communication securely goes through zero trust to make sure...
