Zscaler Builds AI Leadership Team

Cybersecurity and zero trust security company Zscaler has hired Claudionor Coelho Jr. as its chief AI officer and Mohamed Shabar as its executive vice president for data and AI platforms as it "embarks on its next era of growth and leading-edge advancements," the company announced November 6.

These executive additions will help "propel Zscaler's innovation engine and enable our customers to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives," Chief Technology Officer Syam Nair said.

New Hires Bring AI Experience to Zscaler

Coelho has helped organizations innovate with AI and machine learning, Zscaler stated. Prior to joining Zscaler, Coelho served as chief AI officer and senior vice president of engineering at Advantest, a Japanese company that specializes in automatic test equipment. Previously, Coelho was a vice president and fellow of AI and head of AI labs at Palo Alto Networks. He also held ML and deep learning roles at Google.

Shabar has experience with driving automation, AI and cloud platform development, Zscaler indicated. He joins Zscaler from Salesforce, where he led the business' marketing cloud technology organization. He also spent 18 years at Microsoft and helped the company develop platforms, developer tools and ecosystems.

Zscaler Debuts Generative AI Innovations

The Coelho and Shabar hirings come after Zscaler in June 2023 announced generative AI-powered security solutions at its Zenith Live '23 event in Las Vegas, Nevada. The solutions include:

Security Autopilot uses AI to learn from cloud-based policies and logs and ensure that they continuously secure an organization's data.

Zscaler Navigator provides a natural language interface that customers can use to interact with Zscaler products and access relevant documentation details.

Data loss prevention (DLP) offerings guard against data leakage across various video, audio and other media formats.

These solutions are currently available in preview.

What the Future Holds for Zscaler

The Shabar and Coelho hirings highlight Zscaler's "unwavering commitment to leading the innovation path of the evolving AI landscape," the company said.

Moving forward, Zscaler may continue to develop mobile and cloud security solutions that leverage AI and ML. In doing so, Zscaler customers will be able to use these solutions to securely connect their end-users, devices and applications and protect against cyberattacks and data loss.