Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said job losses due to AI are “overstated,” at least for now. “I don’t think 80% of jobs are going away anytime soon,” Arora said in an interview with the Economic Times, adding: “The world needs three to five times as many people with technical skills as we have today.” “Anything that leverages AI is going to have to be done by someone technical,” he told the publication, adding that one of the key requirements for AI to take over a job is that it doesn’t require human judgment. AI is well-suited to solving deterministic problems, such as customer support problems. But real-world work comes with special cases,” Nikesh Arora said. He gave the example of self-driving cars, saying models need to be constantly retrained for unusual scenarios. “The same is true across the industry. We need structured data, edge case training, and continuous learning systems. It’s not going to happen overnight,” he added.
Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora talks about the threat of AI to software
When asked about the threat of AI automation to the software sector, Nikesh Arora said: “There are concerns that the software industry is under attack from AI. AI makes it easier and faster to build software, reducing the need for traditional software spend. This may be the case in some subsectors. If the product is purely analytical and can be easily recreated using AI, there may be disruption. If business systems can be automated by agents, there is a risk.”He also dismissed the idea that cybersecurity could be a collateral damage to the AI wave. Rather, he sees AI increasing the demand for protection. “I’m sure half the speeches here are written by some kind of LLM that helps scriptwriters. But the security mechanism is different because it inspects the traffic. The LLM can tell you that a file or address is invalid, and so can we. Most of our business revolves around inspection software: hardware firewalls, software, remote user protection, cloud security. That’s why I don’t think cybersecurity is under threat from AI. Rather, AI increases complexity…which increases the need for security,” he said.
