AI is Reshaping The 12 Cybersecurity Platforms (Part 1)

From firewalls to cloud security,a practical look at how vendors are moving past the hype.

Hello Cyber Builders 🖖

AI is coming massively into cybersecurity. Two years after the “ChatGPT moment,” we’ve seen vendors across the industry racing to embed generative AI into their platforms. Some moves are potential breakthroughs, others are just marketing gloss.

In this article, I’ll walk through the three cybersecurity platform categories and show how AI is actually being integrated—what’s shipping today, what practical use cases are emerging, and what the major players have announced.

A quick recap if you’re new here. Last spring, we broke down the 12 cybersecurity platforms—a map of the field that cut through the acronyms and jargon. It became one of the most read and shared Cyber Builders posts, precisely because people are tired of vendor buzzwords and want a clear picture. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to start there. We will cover AI's impact on the other platforms in the following posts over September.

Then, in August, we explored the frontier of AI research in cybersecurity: from DARPA’s AIxCC challenge to how XBOW is making AI a reliable companion for penetration testers. Those breakthroughs showed what’s possible when AI is treated as an operator, not just a feature.

AI in Cybersecurity: Not a Magic Wand, But a Multiplier

Intelligent Security Requires Validation & Orchestration

With that context in mind, let’s dive into how the 12 cybersecurity platforms are integrating AI today—and how they’ll continue to evolve as generative AI becomes the new control plane of security.

The 12 Cybersecurity Platforms at the Age of AI (Part 1)

Network Security

Network security is your first line of defense, protecting networks from external threats by monitoring and controlling traffic. Without a firewall, VPN, and proper segmentation in place, you’re leaving your organization vulnerable to basic attacks, and you are not preventing criminals from spreading widely in your network once breached.

🔐 Includes: Firewalls, IDS/IPS, SASE, ZTNA, VPNs, SWG, and network traffic analysis.

Firewalls and ZTNA once meant static policies. Now, AI is rewriting the stack.

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) was about fixed rules: “Block everything not on the whitelist,” or “Allow only IPs X through VPN”? AI is replacing with a more agile approach.

Take Cisco’s Hypershield, for instance. Cisco calls it an AI-native distributed security fabric, designed for zero-trust, private datacenter environments. Hypershield doesn’t just sit at the perimeter; it embeds enforcement everywhere—from NICs to software components on every server—so security adapts in real time across your data center and cloud. It's a smart move from a hardware and software vendor like Cisco to push security from the perimeter to the chip, including endpoints and containers.

It is supposed to self-segment based on behavior, apply surgical control “in minutes instead of months,” perform “virtual patching” without downtime, and learns continuously as the environment changes. In short, Hypershield replaces rigid policies with AI-driven policies. AI is here to help with automation and scalability. Without AI, you can’t push security to all the boundaries (chip, containers, hypervisor, gateways). (Cisco, Cisco Blogs).

I’d love to see this in real action in a private data center and see how difficult it is to set up, configure, and run. Cisco promises segmentation in minutes instead of months—but the test will be whether customers can actually deploy it without breaking production.

On the other side, Cloudflare’s Firewall for AI brings the same agility to AI applications. This is a WAF built specifically to shield large language model (LLM) apps—scanning every user prompt before it hits the model, spotting prompt injections, unsafe content, or attempts to exfiltrate data. What’s powerful is that it's integrated right into Cloudflare’s global edge network, enforces rules like rate-limiting or PII filters before prompts ever hit infrastructure, and blocks threats automatically. It is an AI-aware policy enforcement at the edge. (The Cloudflare Blog).

Cloudflare’s Firewall for AI sounds sleek, but it raises the question: will every org soon need AI-aware WAFs, or is this only for companies deploying LLMs like SaaS Vendors?

Cloudflare's latest AI feature and Cisco's vision of security, spanning from the perimeter to network interface chips and software containers, are refreshing.

They acknowledge that network security cannot be limited to packets but must also understand application logic, especially now with AI model prompts. Enforcement points should be everywhere, not just at specific locations in the network.

Photo by REVTLProjects on Unsplash

Endpoint Security

Every laptop, mobile phone, or desktop is a target—and an entry point. Endpoint security ensures that every device connecting to your network is secured, monitored, and under control. Without it, a single infected device could compromise your entire infrastructure.

🛡️ Includes: EDR, antivirus, MDM, encryption, patch management, and application control.

Analysts, Meet Your New AI Sidekicks

Charlotte AI from CrowdStrike helps manage customer consoles by automating endpoint detection analysis, allowing analysts to focus on more complex tasks. This AI Detection Triage reviews new alerts, prioritizes them, and identifies true positives with an accuracy rate of over 98%. It also suggests response actions within an auditable framework. Overall, this tool saves SOC teams significant time each week, streamlining routine investigations. (crowdstrike.com, Venturebeat)

Next, there’s SentinelOne’s Purple AI—now showcased in the Athena release.  Purple AI Athena features agentic deep reasoning, auto-triage, on-the-fly threat hunting, and full-loop remediation with no-code orchestration. It integrates with your existing SIEMs and data lakes, so your AI doesn’t just live in a sandbox—it's part of your SOC. (SentinelOne, SecurityBrief India)

The described AI solutions are designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations centers (SOCs). They automate the initial triage of alerts from various data sources, providing summaries that are easy for human analysts to understand and offering suggestions or initiating response workflows.

According to vendors, these tools aim for high accuracy—around 98%… If we follow vendors’ claims, these AI copilots promise superhuman accuracy—but the question is whether your SOC can trust them blindly. The challenge is figuring out where AI can take the wheel, and where humans must stay in control.

The goal is to enable teams to concentrate on more complex and high-impact decisions. The approach is presented as one that enhances analyst capabilities without replacing their roles, instead serving as an augmentation to handle routine tasks.

3. Cloud Security

You’ve moved to the cloud, but so have the attackers. Cloud security protects workloads, apps, and infrastructure from misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and threats hiding in the complexity of cloud environments. If you're not securing it, you're just trusting someone else's server with your business.

☁️ Includes: CNAPP, CSPM, CWPP, container security, Kubernetes posture management.

It is also about enhancing asset visibility, configuring products, and securing AI workloads.

Palo Alto Networks supercharged Prisma Cloud with Precision AI and the Prisma Cloud Copilot, transforming dry misconfiguration hunts into conversational intelligence. Now, you can ask natural language questions like “Which S3 buckets are internet-exposed?” and instantly get answers—with suggested fixes and attack-path insights built right in. It’s more visual and intuitive. (Palo Alto Networks, Google Cloud)

Wiz tackled the rising complexity of AI-powered environments with AI-Security Posture Management (AI-SPM). This powerhouse provides complete visibility into your AI infrastructure, including OpenAI and AWS Bedrock services, detects misconfigurations, uncovers AI-specific attack paths, and helps enforce policy-driven remediation. Keep your AI pipelines safe, compliant, and visible—all from the same console. The marketing wording is ever better now as they coined the term “AI-BOM” (wiz.io, Cloud Wars, AI-BOM)

Meanwhile, Orca Security went even further in closing the gap between threat detection and developer action. With AI-driven remediation, Orca now converts alerts into pull requests—streamlining fixes directly in your CI/CD flow. In case you missed it, they also acquired Opus in 2025, bolstering their CNAPP with agentic AI capabilities for fully autonomous vulnerability remediation. That means fewer tickets, fewer tool-hops, and more secure merging. (orca.security, Dark Reading)

This evolution in security and development tools, driven by artificial intelligence, matters because it leads to more efficient, secure, and reliable systems.

For “customers” - either internal corporate users of cloud service, or users of a SaaS application - this means faster access to new features, enhanced protection of their data.

Conclusion

AI in cybersecurity is no longer a future promise. It’s here, baked into firewalls, endpoints, and cloud platforms you probably already use. Some of it is transformative—like auto-remediation and adaptive zero trust. Some of it is still marketing gloss. Some are good speed-ups for configuration or monitoring.

If you’re leading security today, you can’t afford to wait for a perfect “AI strategy.” Start small. Test these tools. See how they fit your environment and your people.

Because here’s the truth: AI won’t replace your security team. But the teams that learn to work with AI will quickly outpace the ones that don’t.

And this is only Part 1. In the following posts, we’ll look at how AI is reshaping the other nine cybersecurity platforms—and what that means for your roadmap this year.

Laurent 💚