Black Hat USA 2026 | Anthony James, Fortinet

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Anthony James

EVP Marketing

Fortinet

play_circle_outline Convergence of networking and security; need consistent policy and visibility across users, apps, data, AI

play_circle_outline CISOs prioritizing business risk, policy decisions, and balancing productivity versus security

play_circle_outline Operationalizing Enterprise AI: From Research to Production and Preventing Agentic/Shadow AI Data Leaks

play_circle_outline AI governance and control: token management and protection for AI infrastructure

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Anthony James, Fortinet

Anthony James

EVP Marketing Fortinet

In this interview from Black Hat 2026, Anthony James, senior vice president of product marketing at Fortinet, joins theCUBE's Krista Case and Jon Oltsik to discuss how enterprises are consolidating fragmented security architectures to keep pace with AI-driven threats. James, who returned to Fortinet after helping shape its early platform strategy, traces the industry's shift from point products toward unified platforms built for operational simplicity. He details how the Fortinet Security Fabric ties networking and security together through consistent data an... Read more

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What evolutions or changes have you observed over the past year, especially through the lens of customer conversations? add

What are CISOs most concerned about right now, and how should organizations address those concerns through policies, tooling, and risk management (especially given AI-driven threats)? add

How has customer adoption of AI changed over the past 6–12 months, and what challenges do organizations face when moving from experimentation to production (including data security and cost-control concerns)? add

How can AI infrastructure be governed, operated, and protected—specifically regarding data sharing, control of tokens, identity management, and preventing unauthorized use or data exfiltration? add

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Anthony James, Fortinet

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(INTRO)

Krista Case

>> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're live here at Black Hat 2026 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Krista Case. We're digging into a lot of concepts around these very fragile security architectures and how they're becoming even more fragile in this era of AI. For security leaders, they're trying to enable the business to adopt AI, but at the same time, not add more operational complexity to those security stacks. We're going to talk in this segment about the networking and security components of this overall architecture. They're becoming harder to separate these days. Organizations need consistent policy and visibility across users, apps, data, and AI, no matter where they're operating. So again, that places more emphasis on the architecture. and for CISOs, we're hearing that they're considering looking beyond individual products and they're trying to consider platforms to simplify their operations while improving their ability to adapt to these business requirements. I'm here with Anthony James, EVP of Marketing with Fortinet. Anthony, thanks so much for joining theCUBE today.

Anthony James

>> My pleasure, thank you for having me.

Krista Case

>> Yeah, appreciate it. So Anthony, you've got an interesting background, I'll let you go over it, but you've viewed the industry from multiple perspectives and you're back at Fortinet now. Can you talk about maybe what sort of evolutions or changes you've seen over the last maybe 12 months or so, especially through the lens of customer conversations that you're having?

Anthony James

>> Yeah, it's been a fascinating time. A little bit about my background. I started at Fortinet in its early days, 2004 to 2010, and I really had a great time watching it evolve into a company that innovated across multiple parts of what was at that point kind of a fragmented market. And honestly, we had a firewall, we had VPN, we had URL filtering. And all of those things, CISOs had to struggle with, how do I combine these into an experience that's simple for users? And so 20 plus years ago, Ken had the vision and foresight to say we need to consolidate these things into a much more usable platform. So fast forward now, and you asked me about my career, I then left Fortinet and went and did a lot of exciting stuff in the industry and coming back, Ken's vision is still ringing true. If you look 20 years later after we started this whole idea of unifying threat management on a firewall, we're now seeing that convergence of networking and security and so we see from customer conversations where they still have that struggle, where they want to have best in class point products, but we're seeing now the platforms are becoming much more evolved. And something that Fortinet has done really well over the years is make sure we combine best in breed products within what we call Fortinet Security Fabric, which is what we call our platform. But it's designed to be built from the ground up to consolidate these things and make a CISO's life a little easier while still getting best in breed and best in quality products.

Krista Case

>> Yeah, absolutely, Ken. And I want to double click on the platform in just a minute. But before we get there, as we think about this architecture and how it's evolving. I agree, we've heard a lot of debate, for years in the security industry about best of breed versus solutions. And I think the speed at which our defenders have to respond to this adversarial use of AI is perhaps going to kind of further push us into that platform conversation. But I'm interested, if I'm a practitioner that's tactically looking at steps I can take to maybe consolidate or embrace a platform, what might be one or two of the top of mind recommendations that you'd have?

Anthony James

>> Yeah, the things that we see customers looking at right now, I think the conversation's evolved into things like SecOps and security operations. I think it's evolved into how do I not only identify an adversary that maybe has a foothold in my organization, but how far are they spreading through my organization? So I think practitioners, while they're on the front lines and it's a hard job, I get it, companies like Fortinet are really driving tools that are innovative around giving them the capabilities to identify adversaries, things like security operations, things like security orchestration, to be able to in real time identify, react, and respond. So I think for the practitioner every day they have to think about what is the best way for me to identify the threat faster, zero in on what is the main threat, because they get inundated with a flood of alerts daily. We see this all the time. But we have focused wholeheartedly on making sure that those threats get quantified, categorized, and only the ones that are more significant bubble up to the top, and then things like our security operations platform, our FortiSOC that we just launched, give them the tool set to identify those things in real time at a much faster pace.

Krista Case

>> I agree. Anthony, I think it's really about understanding the level of risk.

Anthony James

>> Yes.

Krista Case

>> and kind of framing that in the business context. Would you agree with that? Is that what you're hearing as well?

Anthony James

>> Oh, 100%. Yeah.It's all about business risk. As much as we love to innovate products, CISOs care about risk. The biggest thing they're worried about is how does my company overcome a challenge? How do I stay out of the news? We see that all the time. And I think for a lot of those organizations, it's not always about tooling. Of course, we are going to be there for them when they decide on the tooling, but it's about what policies can I put in place to protect myself from adversaries, and we know AI is accelerating some of those attacks. So I think we have the opportunity now to work with CISOs to identify those policies that make sense and give them the ability to deploy the tools that map to those policies across the organization. And that's something we do every day, is talk to our CISOs, talk to customers, making sure that as we're building up the technology, we're not building it for technology's sake, we're building it to help them lower risk.

Krista Case

>> Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the role of the CISO is going to really evolve to be one to understand and make those decisions, almost be the arbiters of that risk.

Anthony James

>> Oh, without doubt, yeah. Yeah, and that's something we hear constantly is they're trying to cope with how do I make sure that my infrastructure gives productivity to my end users, but also it eliminates as much risk as possible.

Krista Case

>> Absolutely. So, Anthony, you were talking about Fortinet's Security Fabric. You were having this conversation around the platforms.

Krista Case

>> Yeah. I think it's an interesting conversation to have because in cybersecurity, again, it's always been this mindset of, well, I need best of breed to address this specific vulnerability. vulnerability, but like we've been talking about, there's definitely a need to be able to have more consistent visibility and control and to be able to reduce the operational complexity. Can you talk a little bit about maybe Fortinet's approach and how it's maybe a little bit different from some of the other platforms?

Anthony James

>> Yeah, I think we've gotten to a point in technology where platform is becoming hard to digest. Everyone talks about platform and you could be a small vendor, a large vendor. If you look at the industry as a whole, You have software vendors talking about platforms for decades. We at Fortinet realized early on, and this is going back 20 years, when we build our products, we build them with a fundamental foundational element. And that is they have to integrate together, they have to work together, and they have to simplify the practitioner's life at the end of the day, and also reduce risk. And so when we talk about Fortinet Security Fabric, which is how we call it, our integration strategy, we designed it so that anything we build to help a CISO or a practitioner solve a security challenge, we build it with those foundational elements in mind. It has to be cohesive, it has to integrate with everything else that's already part of Fortinet Security Fabric. And all of that data has to be contextualized the same way. So people aren't looking at the quote unquote platform from another vendor, but they have tools that were bolted on that have different consoles and maybe even different data. So our goal, and we're going to continue to drive that, and we've been very successful, is as we add new capabilities to our portfolio, they are all designed with Fortinet Security Fabric in mind, so that data is consistent, that experience is consistent, and it simplifies the user's experience at the end of the day.

Krista Case

>> And Anthony, I think as you're talking, so certainly the operational side of it resonates based on what I'm hearing, but also almost having a single source of truth. You talked about maybe normalizing some of the data and inputs from these other tools.

Anthony James

>> Yeah, that is a very big part of our goal. And one of the things that I do try to stress on this whole idea of Fortinet Security Fabric, it's not that you have to have everything that we offer. In fact, we have partners that can integrate with our Fabric and we call them Fabric-Ready partners. The goal there is Fortinet Security Fabric is supposed to be that transformation layer where they get that operational simplicity. And if it's all of our products in one Fabric or if it's our products plus other partners in that same Fabric, it comes down to that operational simplicity. We want to make the operations easy for people. They're still finding the threats quickly. They're still remediating as fast as possible. But they're not struggling with console overload and alert overload. That's the goal.

Krista Case

>> Absolutely. So Anthony, you referenced your CEO, Ken. We talked about the platform vision. I know he's also been talking about the SASE firewall. Maybe we can talk a little bit more on the network side in particular. So a lot of organizations maybe have already invested in SASE or another hybrid mesh architecture. Can you talk similar to the conversation we had around the platform play, but what's different about this SASE firewall vision and strategy?

Anthony James

>> Yeah, I'm really excited about this. And I'll go back to 20 plus years ago when we started down the path of having this idea at that time called a unified threat management platform. And that was kind of the same conversation where customers had invested in firewalls. They had invested in maybe web filtering tools, and they had invested in email filtering tools, and anti -spam, and our vision was, well, we can give you a better experience, achieve the same security goal, if not better, by unifying them on a platform. So now if you fast forward 20 years, we're having the same conversation. In fact, if you go back even just recently, we saw the opportunity to consolidate SD-WAN with our firewall, because we saw people were doing the same things, and having to manage two separate platforms to get the same results. And we saw that, yeah, customers had already invested in SD-WAN, but by showing them there's a better way, we were able to consolidate into one of the market -leading SD-WAN products out there. And we see the same opportunity now with SASE. SASE, a lot of vendors over -rotated and said cloud -first and cloud -only strategy. We've since realized with sovereignty and agentic AI, you need something in the network. And we've been the number one firewall vendor in the world for a long time, and so we've realized we can help do the same thing we did 20 years ago with this unified threat management and next -gen firewall, we can do the same thing with SASE. It's the same infrastructure for us on -premise as it is in the cloud for our SASE products, and it gives you the same policy that can transform from on -prem into cloud, so again, back to simplicity, back to making sure that the security is at the utmost level, but not making the life complicated. And so we see this market evolving into consolidating between the SASE market and the NGFW market, into a unified experience for customers, which again, just makes their life easier.

Krista Case

>> Absolutely, and so I guess, how do you think this market category is going to evolve moving forward? I know we were kind of talking about the operational simplicity and the consistency, regardless of on -prem, off -prem, hybrid, which, by the way, I agree is critical. I think that's the way enterprises are operating these days. But what do you think is the future of this market category?

Anthony James

>> It's going to evolve rapidly. we actually did some internal work just to understand what does this mean for us? And we already consolidated things like VPN and Firewall and SD-WAN, and now we're looking at SASE and we can see that that market is going to continually grow. And I think Agentic AI has kind of thrown that whole accelerator into the mix, where people are now having to expand that market even further. So for us, we see that market will be a larger market that covers a lot more capabilities than just what SASE and Firewall does today. We think what will go in there is sovereignty. One of the things that we've invested a lot of research and development and products into is the ability to have not just sovereignty, but hybrid sovereignty. Like you said, hybrid's a big thing. But if I have a multinational organization, I might want sovereignty in some parts, but not in others. We give the ability to do that. And that's where we see this market is going to consolidate AI in some regards for security. It's going to consolidate sovereignty a little bit, and it's going to consolidate quantum. And so we see all those things merging together into a much bigger market than if you just add the two together today.

Krista Case

>> That makes sense. Yeah. So Anthony, we've talked a lot about a lot of different things, right? And one thing that we're seeing here at Black Hat is that enterprises are starting to operationalize AI. They're starting to move it into production.

Anthony James

>> Yes.

Krista Case

>> And so I'm wondering if we can maybe tie this back to the production use of AI.

Anthony James

>> Sure.

Krista Case

>> And where you're seeing customers need the most help from that perspective.

Anthony James

>> Yeah, that is probably the most common conversation we have every day. AI is on everyone's list. Even my wife is not in tech, talks about AI. It's pretty funny.

Krista Case

>> It's true.

Anthony James

>> But what we've seen in the last, if we go back six months to a year, it was research, little bit of experimentation. We've seen that move to more now production. And where we're seeing customers need the most help is, it's not just what used to be shadow AI where people could access tools on the internet. That is still a problem. We want to protect people from accidentally sending out sensitive data within their prompts and other things, we have product capabilities for that already, and we're also seeing as they start to deploy their own internal AI factories, that's one of the areas where I think it's evolving fast. Customers realize that if you go completely cloud AI, you can be stung with a very high bill, but if you install and deploy infrastructure in your data center, now you have a little more control, but with every new application, there's a lot of vulnerability risks, right? Now what we're seeing is customers want to know what people are doing with their AI infrastructure internally, are they standing up elements of AI that's not sanctioned, like agents and MCP servers and downloading code to their desktop, that's a big no-no, and that could be then sending data outside to train other models. So we've developed a lot of tools and we have products that are in market and some that are coming that we'll be excited to announce later this year, where we can help govern that to give you complete governance over your AI infrastructure internally and externally. We can help you operate it, so we can give you things like tools to operate, control over tokens that are being used internally, and we can help you govern how people are using your sanctioned AI infrastructure, and then protect it. You have to have protection, again, if an adversary's going to get in, if they find there's an agentic infrastructure, they're going to capitalize on it. And so we want to make sure things like identities are the right things, and we'll make sure that human to human and machine to machine communications are the right communications, and so we have tools and products that sit all around that infrastructure.

Krista Case

>> Yes, absolutely, the identity piece of it is going to be very significant. I know we were talking about Hugging Face before we came on air.

Anthony James

>> And there was another one just last week.

Krista Case

>> Yes, exactly, exactly. So I think that's going to be a key part of this equation for sure.

Anthony James

>> Yeah, and that's definitely a part. We've spent a lot of investment. We have products in that space right now for identity. We've evolved those over time. Things like PAM products and identity and multi -factor authentication and tokens. But I think that, again, comes back to us as being part of the fabric. That gives you the tool set then to deploy infrastructure that you want and make sure that it's governed and operated and protected the right way.

Krista Case

>> Yeah. So Anthony, say we have the opportunity to sit down in 18, 24 months, which I certainly hope we do.

Anthony James

>> Love to.

Krista Case

>> What do you think will look different about these enterprise security architectures at that time?

Anthony James

>> I think we'll see a lot of internally developed AI applications. I think that's happening fast. And I don't think it will eat the commercial software market. I think there's been a lot of debate about that. I think there'll still be a lot of commercial software, but if you're an enterprise and you are trying to provide productivity to your employees on your confidential data, I think that's where we'll see heavy investment. I think we'll see applications evolve out of that where the employees will get extreme productivity gains. But it's going to come at a cost of, now I need to put more infrastructure in my data centers. I need to have access control. I need to have all of those things wrapped around it. So I think it's going to drive a lot of security. I think we're seeing obviously the tailwinds of that in some of our recent earnings where we had one of our most successful quarters ever. And I think that's just telltale that people are preparing right now. And in 24 months we'll probably see that come to fruition where those infrastructures are deployed, the applications are in production, and people are making sure that they're operating the right way.

Krista Case

>> Absolutely. There's a lot we're going to learn, I think.

Anthony James

>> Yeah, there is.

Krista Case

>> Well Anthony, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I really enjoyed it, really appreciate it.

Anthony James

>> My pleasure, thank you for having me.

Krista Case

>> Thank you so much for joining us. Make sure you tune back in in just a few minutes. We're going to be back with more live here at Black Hat 2026.