AI Agents Are Changing Cybersecurity Forever. Zscaler Is Positioning Itself to Win Big.

Zscaler (ZS) held its annual Zenith event last week, and management focused on how AI is changing the rules of the game. Traditional firewall-based security was suitable when all the users, applications, and data were in one place, but this no longer remains a robust method. Users now access applications from all over the world, thanks to improved cloud infrastructure and adoption.

Zscaler sees the emergence of AI as both a threat and an opportunity. Agents and agentic traffic running continuously — making thousands of requests every second — could eventually surpass the number of human users these systems are currently used to. Susquehanna analyst Shyam Patil, who has a $200 price target on ZS stock, noted that this is increasing the urgency for Zero Trust architecture — a security model that requires every user, application, and device to verify itself every time rather than being trusted automatically.