Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry’s Five Boldest Statements At Zenith Live 2025

The cybersecurity vendor is accelerating its expansion into security operations and enabling AI agents while also continuing to drive ‘transformation’ with its partners, Chaudhry said during the company’s conference.

Zscaler is accelerating its expansion into security operations and enabling AI agents while also continuing to drive “transformation” with its partners, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry said Tuesday.

During his keynote at Zscaler’s Zenith Live 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Chaudhry laid out major growth opportunities and areas of future investment for Zscaler — which included addressing questions about the company’s planned acquisition of Red Canary.

The $675 million deal to acquire Red Canary, a trailblazer in MDR (managed detection and response), was announced last week just ahead of Zenith Live.

“I’ve been asked a few questions — ‘Are you pivoting from a technology company to a managed services company?’” Chaudhry said. “The answer is, ‘No, no, no.’”

Rather, the planned Red Canary acquisition will help Zscaler to develop a more modern approach to threat management than what is offered by traditional security operations (SecOps) technologies, he said.

“We have tons of data. We've got data fabric technology,” Chaudhry said. “I want to accelerate a move to building [an offering in] the threat management application area.”

Chaudhry also offered remarks about Zscaler’s strong position for enabling secure “agent-to-agent” communication and the company’s continually deepening engagement with solution and service provider partners, as well as how Zscaler plans to target improved visibility and AI testing for partners and customers going forward.

What follows are Chaudhry’s five boldest statements at Zenith Live 2025.

Security Operations Vision

During his keynote Tuesday, Chaudhry echoed remarks delivered Monday to an audience of top partners about the vendor’s planned acquisition of Red Canary and aspirations around building a new type of SecOps offering.

Building on the company’s acquisition of security data fabric provider Avalor in March 2024, the deal to acquire Red Canary aims to accelerate Zscaler’s move into SecOps — bringing in a team that has 12 years of experience in the space as well as advanced agentic AI capabilities, the Zscaler CEO said.

“The technology we saw from Red Canary was very impressive,” he said.

Zscaler’s goals in SecOps include delivering dramatic improvements to exposure and threat management while eliminating the need for building costly data lakes, according to Chaudhry.

By combining Zscaler’s core competencies around data and data fabric with Red Canary’s agentic capabilities and expertise, “it's going to help us get to the solution we want to give you at a much faster pace,” he said.

Instead of trying to offer its own MDR service, Zscaler plans to make its broader SecOps offering available through its partners as a new approach to managing threats, he said.

“The focus remains the same — great technology [and building] solutions that bring it to you,” Chaudhry said. “[That] is what drove us to this acquisition.”

Enabling AI Agents

While agentic AI capabilities are already emerging, security will be paramount given how powerful agents could be, Chaudhry said Tuesday.

Agents need their own identities, access to applications and security policies to ensure they don’t take unwanted actions or improperly access data, he said.

Zscaler is “working with many companies, including Microsoft, and figuring out the identity of the AI agents,” Chaudhry said. “Once you have the identity, then [we're] expanding our exchange to make sure we can bring this kind of technology for you — so you not only secure your users, but you can secure your AI agents as well.”

On top of protecting the base-level agentic functionality, however, Zscaler is also exploring how to secure more advanced capabilities in the category.

“You will also see [that] agent-to-agent communication takes place,” Chaudhry said. “That gets a little bit more tricky. But we are working on it to make sure all communication can be handled well.”

Ultimately, “there's no company better positioned to do that than we are, because of the position where we sit,” he said.

Better Engagement With Partners

Zscaler has transformed its efforts with partners over the past 18 months in order to shift from an “opportunity-centric engagement to a consultative engagement,” Chaudhry said.

The pivot began with the hiring of a new CRO and president of global sales, ServiceNow veteran Mike Rich, in late 2023 — and has led to Zscaler working much more closely with its partners to help customers understand their strategy and goals in cybersecurity, according to Chaudhry.

“The sales transformation we've done internally is having better engagement with them — and better engagement with our partners,” he said. “What we're doing is not selling a faster and cheaper firewall that you replace one with the other. It is transformation. Your network fundamentally changes, application access changes, security changes. We need help from our partners.”

Improving Visibility

Looking ahead, major priorities for Zscaler include ensuring that it can provide partners and customers with enhanced visibility into the cloud systems and security that they rely upon from the vendor, Chaudhry said Tuesday.

To help with delivering an “always-on service,” Zscaler going forward aims to “give you better visibility about the health of the cloud, our security practices, data loss and lot of other [aspects] that AI is bringing,” he said.

Looking ahead, “I’m really driving my team to build a new application [for] understanding the full health of your system, your applications,” Chaudhry said. “This is my pet project for the next 12 months [in order] to bring it to you next year.”

Enhanced AI Testing

There is also more automation and improved monitoring coming down the road from Zscaler, according to Chaudhry.

Zscaler receives a massive amount of telemetry from data centers, applications, services and ISPs, he noted, and “we have done a decent job in trying to understand and really find where the issues are.”

However, “my goal is, we should be able to really figure [it] out before any customer has to call us. We aren't there yet. We need to get there. A lot more work needs to be done. And AI is actually going to help us a lot more in this area,” Chaudhry said. “One of the things AI can do better is look for anomalous [activity]. Once you have lots of data, [AI] can help you a lot. So that's an area we're going to focus on.”