“You can’t stand in the way of AI”: Proofpoint CEO on securing the agentic enterprise

For Sumit Dhawan, Proofpoint CEO, almost every customer conversation across the globe, was around a strategic adoption and security of AI.

For Sumit Dhawan, Proofpoint CEO, the cybersecurity market is rapidly changing because of AI. With AI becoming even more powerful with the data it is accessing, Dhawan believes this has now led to a new problem which organizations need to address promptly.

Specifically, while data fuels AI, access to their amount and type of data is now becoming imperative for organizations globally. Dhawan explained that AI’s intent needs to be verified so that it’s doing things which are proper in terms of the prompt that it was given.

“It is an intent and access problem that is highly interrelated. This whole problem space has to be solved by the customers. And that problem is not a small problem. It's a big enough problem which has really dictated our strategy, our roadmap, our investments,” Dhawan said.

Speaking exclusively to CRN Asia during his visit to Singapore, Dhawan explained that there is not only a need for sovereign offerings in AI and security today, but also continuous R&D to ensure that this new genetic workspace is secured for enterprises, which is also what’s driving Proofpoint’s strategy going forward.

“When AI agents became real about nine months or so ago, it made enterprises to think about how they can ensure that there is a behavioral and an intent-level protection for AI agents because they work autonomously, they work non-deterministically, and they feed off of information that's stored throughout in the enterprise. Customers are telling us their issues with adopting AI and how they can make sure that the data is protected,” Dhawan said.

According to Dhawan, almost every customer conversation across the globe, including the ones he had in Singapore were around a strategic adoption and security of AI.

“We call it securing an agentic workspace. Because once you adopt AI, you have an agentic workspace. So, every conversation at this point in time has become a discussion on how to strategically adopt AI and securely enable it for the enterprise,” he said.

The role of partners

Given this scenario, Dhawan shared that the role of partners becomes extremely important as they can really help the enterprises by providing them with the path to move forward in securing their AI.

“Partners can play a pretty big strategic as well as then obviously operational pathway for getting the customers from where they are to where they need to be. However, it's not easy given the rate and the pace of change. The big thing that partners have to do firstly at this point in time is having the right involvement in understanding tech. It's a very rapid pace of change and without having an understanding of the tech, partners typically play a critical role in that technical enablement,” Dhawan said.

He also mentioned that Proofpoint oftentimes bring certain partners and gets them involved in proof of concepts and early sorts of experiments that they’re doing with specific customers. And usually through those efforts, Proofpoint is able to bring technology and value understanding of the partners.

“Partners want to build stronger businesses with AI. We are getting a lot of partner interest in making sure they can understand and learn, so that they can take the right solutions to the marketplace. It's a perfect time for partners to get their skills, their team, and their talent updated on securing and protecting AI and data. And look, they already have partnerships with players like us and it's easy for them to expand using the relationships they already have,” Dhawan added.

For Dhawan, partners are also critical in Proofpoint’s go-to-market to the midmarket and smaller organizations.

“In this region, that's a very big sector. This is where partners come in as well. We will never have enough investment purely to serve every customer directly, especially in providing technical expertise, and our partner ecosystem has done that very well in the entire region. We bring our solutions, enable our partners and so the enablement of partners and making them successful in ensuring that they can provide that reach to the customers becomes extremely important for us,” he said.

What follows is the rest of the conversation with Dhawan. Do note that the responses have been edited for clarity.

What's your message to your customers who are still trying to figure out how do they tackle this AI problem?

Look, everyone's realized that you can't stand in the way of AI because it's a board level priority. It's a CEO level priority and cybersecurity teams and technology teams need to find a way to enable AI.

Also, they need to look at the governance of AI by just managing that as a process and a committee, which is a good place to start. Now the good news is there are technology platforms and solutions available to turn that processes that you have put in place through committees that can be coded into technology solutions that can run with humans in the loop to govern the behavior of AI and ensure that there is a right balance and level of access of data to AI.

So, number one, don't stand in the way.

Number two, if you have a process, turn that process into more of a technology and a solution to embrace the concept of this agentic workspace and security using the technology solution. And those technologies are available now. They weren't available a year ago, and that's our focus area, and we'd love to partner with enterprises in ensuring they're able to do so.

Are you looking to partner with any other technology vendors as well in terms of partnering and offering joint solutions and capabilities?

Our solution is to some extent a cybersecurity and a governance platform. So, we integrate very closely on three fronts. Number one, we integrate our technology with data platforms because we need to protect the data.

Number two, we integrate very closely with AI platforms, including we are partners with OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, whichever agent development and AI platform is, we integrate with them.

And number three, we integrate with other cybersecurity solutions because cybersecurity, if anyone says there is a single vendor that provides a full solution set, it's actually a pretty bad path to go to and could end up in a compromised solution.

What we do, we do the best in the market, and we provide integrations with other providers that are in network security or endpoint security. And we integrate with those solutions so that enterprises can get the best at the end of the day and integrated platforms. And so that's our partnership strategy and ecosystem strategy.

And so, we continually form partnership announcements. We recently announced a deeper partnership with OpenAI using the APIs. We've done a similar partnership with Anthropic with their APIs, and we are continually seeking more of those integrations with the single mission of securing that agentic workspace.

Proofpoint has made a number of acquisitions in the past. Will you be looking to make more acquisitions?

While I'm proud of all the organic innovation we do, we also realize that there are a lot of smart people who are continually assessing the needs of the customers and are building technologies.

And I love the acquisitions whereby we are able to bring some of that technology that has been built outside of Proofpoint. But those founders are looking to have that technology adopted by thousands of customers at a rapid pace. And if we can bring that technology within Proofpoint, that helps our goal and mission as a component of our platform to secure the agentic workspace.

And we can make it easy for customers to adopt those solutions as part of the platform; we welcome it. So, we are always seeking it. I spend a considerable amount of my time meeting the founders, continuing to see what makes sense.

I consider that as part of my job to make sure that whatever makes sense for our customers that we are not developing ourselves. We bring that into the Proofpoint family and our customers as part of our platform.

There's nothing that we're announcing at this point of time. But we do envision; typically we have done one acquisition every six to nine months. And I think we're going to probably stay with the same cadence for technology acquisition. We don't look at it purely from a calendar perspective to be candid, but roughly it works out that we're able to do one every six to nine months.

So, with that said, what's next for you Proofpoint?

Well, first of all, I think we're in a rapidly evolving space. To me, I think that this whole big, broad vision that we have put in place in terms of securing the agentic workspace and giving our customers a true platform for protecting against AI-driven threats as well as secure enablement of AI, because those are the two components of this agentic workspace, I feel it's a broad vision.

So, there are capabilities on the horizon in a roadmap. We look forward to unveiling some of those at the Proofpoint Protect conference.