Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora says companies don’t have the workforce they need in the age of AI.
“The challenge today is that 90% of corporate employees are not AI-savvy,” Arora said on a recent episode of the 20VC podcast.
Arora said the problem is that there are no training courses available for the 21,000 employees of cybersecurity companies. It’s up to them to level up and support the company, which has a market capitalization of over $235 billion.
“They have to be able to learn on their own,” he said. “I think we’re going back to a Darwinian moment where everyone has to figure out who’s really good.”
Arora said other companies are also facing this reality and are choosing to respond with mass layoffs. The former Google and SoftBank CEO specifically mentioned Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Block CEO Jack Dorsey.
“You’ve seen guys like Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey say, ‘I’m going to tear down my organization and start building it from scratch,'” Arora said. “Then they decided there was no help, so they moved to a version with 30 to 40 percent less staff. I can’t train these people. I just have to find people to help me with this job.”
Mr. Dorsey announced in February that Mr. Block would lay off more than 4,000 employees, nearly half the company. Twitter’s former CEO said the company is doing well, but needs to be “honest” about how AI – what he calls “intelligence tools” – is changing the status quo.
Coinbase announced in May that it would lay off 14% of its workforce, impacting approximately 700 roles. In an email to employees posted on X, Armstrong wrote that the job cuts are aimed at making the cryptocurrency company “leaner, faster and more efficient for its next phase of growth.”
Arora said Palo Alto Networks is taking a different approach. Instead of large-scale layoffs, cybersecurity companies are using attrition to gradually replace employees. He said the company also knows exactly where it will find future tech workers.
“We have only hired through hackathons,” he said, referring to tech jobs. “In 12 months, you could change 20 or 25% of the team to some degree,” he added. “Give us three years. I hope we have enough AI-savvy people working in Palo Alto.”
The company continues to grow. According to its most recent 10th quarter filing, Palo Alto Networks increased its total workforce by 5,423 people from the end of fiscal year 2025 to the third quarter of 2026.
How will Palo Alto Networks change?
That doesn’t mean all roles within a company will grow in the same way.
Arora wondered why Frontier Models needed “400 or 600 people for marketing” when they could already train them in marketing strategy and a company’s unique voice.
“My biggest problem in marketing is that I have 600 employees, and I don’t know if everyone fully understands my tone of voice, how to consistently communicate my value proposition, and how to not destroy my brand by having different collaterals in the public domain,” he said.
Arora said his “rule of thumb” is that over the next three years, companies will “probably have half of their employees in management roles, such as marketing, human resources, and finance.” In the meantime, Arora said AI applications will advance to the point where they can replace many of the jobs of employees.
One such advancement is that AI models/tools can provide feedback to human users, allowing them to express their opinions more freely.
“Your academics, whether you want to call them AI assistants, AI marketing assistants, AI HR assistants, will say, ‘I’ve seen your copy, and it sucks. It’s not good enough. It doesn’t match your tone of voice. This is what I recommend.’ ” he said. “I have an opinion on this. Then my average employee would be much smarter than he is today. Then I wouldn’t need as many employees because they would do most of the work for you.”
At the same time, Arora said more technical and sales resources are needed. Arora has previously said he would like to hire more cybersecurity engineers and researchers in the future. In an interview with 20VC, he said there are employees who want to leverage AI resources to implement plans to transform marketing and human resources.
“I think it’s a mistake for people to believe that because AI will take our jobs, fewer people will work,” he says. “I don’t believe that. I think what’s going to happen is that there will be more people on my team than you can imagine who want more technical resources, more AI-savvy resources, because they want to do exactly these things.”