When you open tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, you might wonder: How can I keep my personal information safe? When the cybersecurity teams at Palo Alto Networks work with AI, they’re asking a parallel question: How can we keep the world safe?
The most meaningful workplace innovations drive holistic change, reshaping how a company operates, collaborates, and delivers on its mission. In an era where nearly every aspect of life runs on digital infrastructure, the integration of AI is one such transformative innovation, and securing it is a global, cross-functional effort. Holistic.
Palo Alto Networks is tackling that cybersecurity risk head-on: AI meets AI. The company’s AI-forward approach to protecting our digital way of life is allowing them to safeguard organizations and data worldwide faster than ever, while also establishing guardrails that make existing online less risky.
To see how their teams and technology are driving change, we spoke to Palo Alto Networks employees across product, sales, marketing, and cloud consulting. Their experiences reveal how AI is opening new opportunities—for customers and for the people building the future of cybersecurity from within.
Securing the front door of the modern enterprise
If AI is reshaping cybersecurity at scale, that transformation often starts at the point of greatest risk: the user. Today’s workforce spends the majority of its time inside the browser, making it one of the most critical and historically overlooked security layers.
For Nataly Dalal, that reality shapes her work as the senior product manager for Prisma Browser and the bridge between customer security needs and engineering innovation.
“I contribute to our mission by securing the ‘front door’ of the modern enterprise: the browser,” she says. “In today’s web-first world, the browser has become the primary hub of productivity, with workers spending between 85 percent and 100 percent of their day inside it. However, because traditional security often stops at the network level, it creates a ‘browser blindspot’ that has led to security incidents in 95 percent of organizations.”
Prisma Browser helps close that gap by protecting sensitive data in SaaS, web, and GenAI apps without compromising the user experience.
“We are using Precision AI® to fundamentally change the game by ‘fighting AI with AI,’” Dalal says. “In the past, security was reactive, but now we use real-time AI-powered scanning to analyze every web page before it even loads.” That shift allows threats to be identified instantly, even ones never seen before. “Every single day, our AI identifies nearly 9 million new and unique attacks and analyzes over 3.8 billion new URLs.”
The result isn’t just stronger protection. It’s a reimagined model of security that anticipates risk instead of responding to it.
Regional Sales Manager Joko Leliveld sees this shift shaping customer strategy conversations, too. “AI has fundamentally changed how we approach security conversations. Tools like AI-powered threat detection and automation allow us to move from reactive discussions to proactive, strategic ones. For example, using AI-driven insights, we can show customers how threats evolve in real time and how automation can reduce response times dramatically. This shifts the conversation from ‘security as a cost’ to ‘security as a business enabler.’”
AI driving creativity and scale
Behind the scenes, AI is also transforming how teams operate. For marketing director Aiko Soda, the technology boosts productivity and fuels creativity. “AI has become one of my most powerful tools for pushing the boundaries of how we operate in marketing at Palo Alto Networks,” she says. “While I am still discovering its full potential, the company’s investment in AI-enabled platforms allows me to dramatically expand both my productivity and creative execution.”
Its impact is already tangible. “AI has enabled me to automate previously manual event-operations tasks and refine marketing copy quickly and effectively,” Soda says. “By leveraging years of translation memory, it enables on-brand, market-relevant localization—going beyond literal translation to reflect cultural nuance while driving significant time and cost savings. Most importantly, AI can extract insights from massive data sets in seconds, directly informing my marketing strategies. By automating complex workflows and delivering real-time analysis and insights, it allows me to focus on high-impact leadership and business outcomes.”
That shift from manual execution to strategic thinking isn’t limited to marketing. Aparajita Nandi, a senior IT software engineer at Palo Alto Networks, applies AI across the development lifecycle to improve both speed and system reliability. “AI helps me move significantly faster, surface better design alternatives, reduce repetitive work, and focus on higher-level problem-solving,” she says. That efficiency matters because the platforms her team builds directly affect how quickly products can be evaluated and delivered to customers. “By reducing manual effort and improving reliability in these workflows, I help internal teams deliver our security innovations faster and with fewer risks.”
From automation to autonomy
Once risk is mitigated, a deeper shift begins. Tehreem Tungekar is a Cortex Cloud Domain Consultant, acting as the technical bridge between Palo Alto Networks’ advanced security solutions and customers’ strategic goals. She says AI can now handle much of the manual workload independently—a huge departure from how cybersecurity has traditionally operated.
“Traditionally, security analysts had to manually correlate siloed alerts across identity, network, and code to find a breach path. Our Cortex AgentiX replaces this manual toil by autonomously discovering ‘toxic combinations’—like an exposed workload with excessive permissions, and reasoning through the risk to execute a fix in seconds. This shifts us from human-speed detection to machine-speed resolution.”
The impact is immediately visible in her work with customers. Recalling a recent project, she says: “I recently worked with a major healthcare provider migrating its patient portal from an on-premises to a cloud environment. They were terrified that their 'speed to market' would lead to a misconfigured S3 bucket or an exposed API, essentially risking patient privacy for the sake of digital progress.” By integrating AI-driven security directly into development workflows, her team helped transform the organization’s approach. “We didn’t just ‘stop a hacker’; we changed their culture.”
The provider went from finding 2,000 vulnerabilities in production and spending days fixing them to detecting and resolving them at the point of creation. “By securing their code from development to production, we protected the sensitive data of millions of patients, ensuring their 'digital way of life' remained private and functional,” Tungekar says. “That’s how I scale the mission: by making security invisible but invincible.”
Nandi sees a similar ripple effect in her work, where strong internal systems enable global teams to operate with speed, accuracy, and confidence.
“The better our internal platforms are, the more efficiently we can manage Palo Alto Networks’ business and serve our customers,” she says.
Opportunity without borders
What ties these experiences together is a shared pattern: AI expands what’s possible when paired with collaboration.
Across roles, employees consistently emphasize the importance of global teamwork. “Cybersecurity challenges don’t stop at borders, so alignment is critical,” Leliveld says. Soda echoes that perspective from a marketing standpoint, explaining that she focuses on “building scalable, reusable frameworks” so teams can execute effectively across regions. Tungekar adds that in cloud environments, “there are no borders, but there are different regulatory landscapes,” making coordinated global standards essential.
Nandi, who is based in India, sees the benefits of a work cycle that runs continuously because of time zones: “We’ve established a delivery model where work continues almost around the clock. This global collaboration has helped accelerate releases, improve decision-making across teams, and ensure that the solutions we build meet the expectations of a worldwide user base.”
Equally important is the culture that sustains that momentum. At Palo Alto Networks, employees say feedback is expected and ideas can come from anywhere—something reinforced in their day-to-day work.
“I was working on an automated demo video creation project for Cortex Cloud,” Tungekar says. “For this initiative, it was vital that our automated assets solved real customer problems rather than just showing off technical features. I felt empowered to provide critical feedback because during the build phase, I noticed the demo flow was becoming overly complex. Because our culture encourages radical candor, I felt safe to challenge the group’s direction.” This openness ultimately led to a stronger customer-facing solution.
Dalal likewise emphasizes constant collaboration, explaining, “I don’t view feedback as a one-time event; I make it a point to constantly provide feedback and collaborate with my colleagues across engineering, sales, and marketing. This environment of safety is what allows us to iterate so quickly.”
For employees, that openness also fuels growth. Soda, who has spent nine years at the company, says one of the most striking aspects of its culture is its investment in people. “I am especially grateful of how the leadership was willing to create a unique, tailored role for me―combining the responsibilities of JAPAC DG Hub Lead and Head of Japan Marketing,” she says. “These functions are rarely combined in traditional corporate structures, but the company recognized my specific experience and designed the role to align with my growth and the business's needs. It reflects Palo Alto Networks’ commitment to a high-performance culture that retains startup agility at global scale.”
Leliveld agrees: “What truly sets Palo Alto Networks apart is the combination of purpose, people, and opportunity. The company invests deeply in its employees, values integrity, and actively supports internal mobility. You’re encouraged to grow, speak up, and bring your full self to work. It’s an environment where ambition and wellbeing coexist.”
“The company invests deeply in learning, innovation, and inclusion,” Nandi adds. “This balance of accountability, growth, and empathy makes Palo Alto Networks a truly exceptional place to build a long-term career.”
Together, their perspectives suggest that AI’s greatest impact isn’t any single feature or platform. It’s the way technology unlocks opportunity, helping employees move faster, think bigger, and collaborate more effectively while advancing a shared global mission. Or, as Dalal puts it: securing “every user, on any device, from any location.”
At Palo Alto Networks®, teams are united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. They thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, Palo Alto Networks is for you.
