Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Palo Alto Networks Inc
All-In Liquidity: Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Aurora Details AI in Cyber
About Nikesh Arora
Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, has been discussing the impact of artificial intelligence on cybersecurity in several public appearances. During the company’s fiscal third quarter 2026 earnings call on June 2, 2026, Arora said that “we have entered the era of truly cyber capable systems” and described a model called “Mythos” as possessing “the autonomous capability to execute comprehensive attack campaigns from start to finish.” He stated that the company’s AI tool found vulnerabilities in six weeks that “would have normally taken us five to seven years to find.” Arora also said that “analytical SaaS is dead” and that “if you’re an analytical SaaS company, it’s over,” arguing that customers can now run models against data themselves. He declared on the earnings call that “we officially declare SaaS Eclipse for cyber security dead.” Arora also discussed Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition strategy, calling the integration of CyberArk “existential for me” and “existential for my team,” adding that “if I can prove that, the market will give me the license to go win again.” He expressed optimism about AI, stating that “AI is going to be amazing” and that it will “reshape everything we do around us.” Arora noted that the company has had 1,200 customer interactions following the Mythos announcement and that Palo Alto Networks is “hiring more people” on the technology side. He also said he believes Google will be “the first 10 trillion dollar company in our lifetime.”
Transcript (26 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:00
The way this has taken on like wildfire has exposed all of us to the immense possibility it brings. Of course it brings with it lots of interesting questions around ethics, around capabilities. It also brings a lot of questions around how are we going to fund all of this? A lot of infrastructure is needed to make this really work. So lots of amazing questions, but I think being an optimist, the promise of AI is huge.
We're here at the Allin Liquidity Summit in Yville, California, and I'm pleased to be joined by Nikesh Aurora. He's chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, also a speaker on stage. Nikesh, welcome.
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Nikesh Arora0:43
Thank you.
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Interviewer0:44
Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with us. You just finished on stage earlier.
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Nikesh Arora0:50
Yes, I did.
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Interviewer0:50
What is your message here at the liquidity summit?
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Nikesh Arora0:53
Look, this is a fascinating conference because you're seeing about as I heard last night $7.7 trillion represented out in the room and I think it's fascinating to see people's perspective in terms of given the huge technological inflection we're at. Everybody's interested to see where this is all going from an AI infrastructure perspective, an AI deployment perspective. And just the fact that all these investors together, I'm sure, not just the programmatic part, but the post-program part where they get to hang out with each other and actually share notes and compare notes is going to be fascinating.
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Interviewer1:27
AI has been a major topic of conversation here and we're just a few hours into today's programming. Yes. On Monday to really kick things into full gear, pros and cons come up. I'm sure from your perspective you see a lot of pros. Walk me through your thinking big picture.
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Nikesh Arora1:43
Well look, big picture we've never had a technological inflection at this scale. You know, two years ago or two or three years ago ChatGPT came out and all of us just sort of woke up and said, 'Oh my god, look at this AI thing,' and now it's sort of the fastest thing that has caught on. You know, anywhere from 5-year-old kids doing their homework with ChatGPT to older people trying to figure out what ails them and asking their favorite ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. So, I think the way this has taken on like wildfire has exposed all of us to the immense possibility it brings. Of course, it brings with it lots of interesting questions around ethics, around capabilities. It also brings a lot of questions around how are we going to fund all of this? A lot of infrastructure is needed to make this really work. So, lots of amazing questions, but I think being an optimist, the promise of AI is huge.
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Interviewer2:35
Mhm. What does this mean for software, especially when it comes to an upgrade cycle?
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Nikesh Arora2:42
Well, I think software is more than likely going to get rewritten in the next 5 to 10 years. I think the capabilities that AI has shown where it's able to write code, it's able to interpret intent. I think we spent our lives writing software where we've been trying to interpret user intent and trying to design software to feed that intent. AI has the ability to interpret the intent and solve the problem on the fly. So I think the way we do software development, the way we think about products is going to fundamentally change in the next 5 to 10 years. So it's a huge rewrite. A lot of stuff will have to be redone but it's immense possibilities for all the young people who are out there entrepreneurs trying to think about what to do next.
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Interviewer3:21
Mhm. Can AI combat AI?
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Nikesh Arora3:26
Uh, if you wanted to. Hopefully AI is supplementing AI and not putting it in a combative position. But yes, from a cybersecurity perspective, if bad actors get their hands on it and they're going to use AI to try and attack companies or breach companies, you know, we can arm AI on the defensive side to make sure that it's able to contend with what bad actors are trying to do with AI.
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Interviewer3:53
Talk to me more about what this autonomous defense looks like.
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Nikesh Arora3:56
Look, if you think about AI and hopefully you've used it a lot and you realize the more context you give it, the smarter it becomes, right? The more you tell it what you're trying to do, the more you arm it with facts, the more you arm it with data, it gets better and better at understanding your intent and hence is able to get you a better outcome. I think on the defensive side, autonomous security side, it's the same thing. The more it understands the organizational context, the more it understands how you work, the more it understands what normal looks like, it is able to understand when something anomalous happens. When something anomalous happens, it's able to understand the intent and say, 'Oh my god, this doesn't look right.' But for it to know what doesn't look right, it needs to know what right looks like. So, I think we have to spend a lot more time and effort building the capability from the contextual side, the memory of the organization, what's the right answer. It's kind of like training a car to drive itself, right? You have to give all the context around it for it to make good decisions. Similarly, you have to give defensive AI a lot more context in the enterprise for it to be able to go and defend itself against bad actors.
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Interviewer4:58
Give our viewers a sense whether or not they're familiar with Palo Alto Networks, how you are enabling this to make good decisions.
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Nikesh Arora5:05
Well, look, we are the world's largest cybersecurity company. As a consequence, we have the privilege of defending tens of thousands of enterprises around the world. And cybersecurity is somewhat simplistic, right? If it's bad and I know it, I'll stop it at the perimeter. So we are protecting north of 150 million perimeter endpoints in the world. If we see something bad, we stop it. The problem happens when it's not quite bad, you're not quite sure, you have to figure out whether it's bad or not. That's when AI comes into play, or you have to arm yourself with all the context of the organization, position all the data to be able to interpret that in real time so you can actually defend it in real time. So that's what we do. We take real-time signals, understand them, interpret them and try and protect our customers in real time to make sure the bad actors can't get into their infrastructure.
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Interviewer5:51
Mhm. What's your view over the next 5 years?
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Nikesh Arora5:53
In what context?
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Interviewer5:54
In terms of AI and how from a cybersecurity perspective, you are protecting enterprises and of course their users.
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Nikesh Arora6:02
Like I said, I'm an optimist. AI is going to be amazing. It's going to redo everything, reshape everything we do around us, and it's going to be mostly used for good. I'm sure in the wrong hands some people are going to try to use it for nefarious purposes, whether it's nation states or bad actors. I think our job in that time frame is to make sure we arm our customers with the right context, the right capabilities, the right tool sets to be able to defend themselves. We have been somewhat, I'd say, reasonably successful in protecting our customers who've already gone through that evolution of their infrastructure. A lot of customers still need to go through the evolution of their cybersecurity infrastructure, and we stand ready to go help them.
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Interviewer6:43
Nikesh, anything more you want to share with our viewers?
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Nikesh Arora6:45
No, I think it's an amazing time. It's an amazing time to be in technology. It's an amazing time to be in AI. I think things are going to be great.
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Interviewer6:52
We appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us here at the Allin Liquidity Summit.
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Nikesh Arora6:55
Thank you for having me.
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Interviewer6:56
Yep. Nikesh Aurora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks.