How AI Cybersecurity Upgrades Power Fortinet’s Innovation
Cybersecurity demands are surging as digital environments face increasingly fast and complex threats.
In this context, Fortinet expands its AI-led capabilities across its FortiAI technologies, now integrated throughout the Fortinet Security Fabric.
These new features not only enable enterprises to secure their infrastructure but also help navigate the risks tied to AI itself.
Michael Xie, Founder, President and Chief Technology Officer at Fortinet, explains: “Fortinet’s AI advantage stems from the breadth and depth of our AI ecosystem—shaped by over a decade of AI innovation and reinforced by more patents than any other cybersecurity vendor.
“By embedding FortiAI across the Fortinet Security Fabric platform, including new agentic AI capabilities, we’re empowering our customers to reduce the workload on their security and network analysts while improving the efficiency, speed and accuracy of their security and networking operations.
“In parallel, we’ve added coverage across the Fabric ecosystem to enable customers to monitor and control the use of Gen AI-enabled services within their organisation.”
Embedding AI into every layer of cybersecurity
AI is becoming critical in security operations.
Threats are growing faster and smarter and traditional defences – largely manual – are no longer enough.
Fortinet’s new FortiAI upgrades are designed to automate detection, response and prevention. These changes place AI at the heart of modern cyber defence, supporting the need for speed, accuracy and scalability.
Fortinet’s approach recognises AI’s dual role in security: while it enhances defences, it can also serve as a tool for attackers.
Organisations are now under pressure to stay one step ahead by incorporating AI in both operational efficiency and threat detection.
With adversaries using AI to deploy evasive and sophisticated attacks, Fortinet’s FortiAI aims to make threat response proactive rather than reactive.
These enhancements enable faster detection of zero-day attacks through machine learning, while also streamlining threat response with automation.
FortiAI-Protect: Bolstering defences against AI-led attacks
The FortiAI-Protect module upgrades Fortinet’s capacity to detect unknown threats and secure the use of Gen AI tools in enterprise environments.
It operates by offering contextual risk analysis and managing access to high-risk applications.
With AI-led threat detection built into its design, FortiAI-Protect enables:
Monitoring of more than 6,500 AI application URLs
Expansion of ML-based analysis for identifying new malware patterns
Training of intrusion prevention system (IPS) ML models to adapt to evolving threats
Zero-trust controls to block unapproved AI applications
Integration of threat intelligence for contextual threat correlation
This helps security teams respond to emerging threats more quickly and ensures organisations retain control over the use of third-party Gen AI tools.
Fortinet’s capability to enforce granular security policies around AI usage is essential as companies try to leverage Gen AI without risking data leakage or compliance breaches.
FortiAI-Assist: Enabling autonomous network and security operations
The second pillar of Fortinet’s AI innovation lies in FortiAI-Assist.
This feature leverages agentic AI, Gen AI and AIOps to simplify operations and automate troubleshooting.
Through this, Fortinet offers:
Gen AI-powered assistance to build or revise network configurations and security policies
Proactive alerts using historical threat data to reduce false positives and prioritise urgent issues
Autonomous detection and remediation of performance bottlenecks
Advanced threat hunting through analysis of traffic, logs and user behaviours
Correlation of attack patterns with known adversarial tactics
This helps reduce the workload on security operations centre (SOC) teams and bridges talent gaps by automating routine tasks.
In complex, hybrid environments, automation can ensure consistent protection across network edges, endpoints and cloud-native workloads.
The FortiAI-SecureAI framework further strengthens this approach by ensuring AI is deployed securely.
It does so by preventing large language model (LLM) data leaks, maintaining data integrity and protecting sensitive AI models.
Notably, Fortinet assures users that data processed through FortiAI does not leave the network and is not used to train its Gen AI assistant.
Shaping cybersecurity’s AI future
With these innovations, Fortinet is pushing toward fully autonomous security operations, addressing the widening cybersecurity skills gap and supporting secure Gen AI adoption.
These upgrades will affect not only individual enterprises but the broader security ecosystem as well.
By building AI into the core of its operations platform, Fortinet helps organisations defend against AI-led threats and prepares them to safely use emerging AI technologies.
These features are particularly vital in protecting application programming interfaces (APIs), AI models and distributed workloads, which are often overlooked yet highly targeted.
Fortinet’s improved FortiAI shows how AI can be harnessed to safeguard systems and reduce reliance on human intervention, while also protecting against the misuse of AI by malicious actors.
As the line between innovation and risk continues to merge in cybersecurity, Fortinet’s emphasis on automation, visibility and control offers a path forward for businesses navigating digital risk.
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