A week after announcing it was
buying managed detection and response (MDR) specialist Red Canary to expand its agentic AI capabilities,
Zscaler now has unveiled a range of AI-powered offerings that enable the use of the emerging technology in cybersecurity while protecting against AI-based threats.
The news comes on the first day of Zscaler’s
Zenith Live 2025 event this week in Las Vegas. Zscaler’s acquisition of Red Canary and other recent moves underscore the company’s aggressive stance in a cybersecurity ecosystem that’s rapidly evolving, as it integrates AI across its products and services.
"Zscaler is redesigning the boundaries of enterprise security by advancing AI-driven innovations that address the complex challenges of today's digital age," company's Chief Product Officer Adam Geller
said in a statement. "These advancements not only neutralize emerging threats but accelerate collaboration and operational efficiency, allowing businesses to capitalize on the transformative power of AI with confidence and precision.”
Jack Gold, principal analyst with J. Gold Associates, told MSSP Alert that Zscaler’s approach to AI to not only improve the performance of security operations but also to mitigate some of the risk that comes with AI’s use makes sense.
“With the expansion of AI usage, both of these are important and MSSPs need to work with their customers to ensure that AI isn’t causing data breaches or data privacy violations due to the nature of user inquires and the subsequent results,” Gold said.
Building AI Into the Platform
Analysts at investment specialist
AInvest noted Zscaler’s grand plans when looking at the Red Canary deal, industry observers said could come in anywhere from $1 billion to $4 billion. They said the acquisition combines its scale with the AI-driven precision that Red Canary brings to its MDR capabilities.
“This acquisition isn't just about adding another tool to the toolkit,” they
wrote in a report. “It's about building a future-proofed security architecture that leverages AI to detect threats 10 times faster, reduce false positives, and automate remediation at scale. ... This combination isn't just additive – it's exponential. The result? A system that can detect, triage, and neutralize threats before they escalate, turning the tide in the war against cybercrime.”
Using and Protecting AI
At the conference, Zscaler executives showed other steps they’re taking to build that architecture to address the challenges when deploying AI tools in large and widely distributed environments through AI capabilities that bring automation and precision to the vendor’s platform.
Included is AI-powered data classification that delivers human-like intuition when detecting and identifying sensitive content. The tool includes more than 200 categories to drive advanced classification to find data that traditional regular expression (regex)-based signature detection can’t, and can do it quickly.
The new offerings also include an AI-based user-to-application automation engine designed to make application management, grouping, and segmentation workflows that include built-in user identity. The goal is to accelerate segmentation workflow to enhance a company’s security posture, according to Zscaler.
Visibility Into the Network
The San Jose, California-based company is also delivering Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) Network Intelligence, which uses AI to benchmark and visualize internet and regional ISP performance. The tool collects data from every user’s device within an environment, runs MTR probes to pull in network metrics like latency and packet loss, and then uses the data to create a baseline that performance can be measured against, according to Javier Rodriguez Gonzalez, director of product management at Zscaler.
“Modern networks have become increasingly complex as enterprises adopt cloud, SaaS [software-as-a-service], and support distributed workforces,” Gonzalez wrote in a blog post, noting that the internet is now the corporate network, which makes it difficult for network teams to keep visibility into the network, zero trust environments, and applications. “Mapping the internet is difficult, and pinpointing the root cause of issues is nearly impossible since they no longer own the network infrastructure.”
In addition, “routing traffic based on individual users is impractical, as traffic now rides the internet, where routing control is unavailable,” he wrote. “These factors lead to unresolved performance issues, poor user experiences, and productivity loss. ... This [ZDX] ultimately helps network operations troubleshoot faster and regain control of distributed networks. As networks grow more complex, proactive visibility is no longer optional – it’s essential.”
Zscaler’s platform also includes an enhanced defensive capability with expanded prompt visibility. The technology can offer better visibility and control over generative AI applications like Microsoft Copilot through advanced prompt classification and inspection.
Bad actors running prompt injection attacks will manipulate the input prompts in AI models to get them to bypass safety measures and guidelines. Zscaler’s new capability is designed to enable organizations to detect and block prompts that violate policies and use existing data loss protection (DLP) tools to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance.
