Fortinet Enhances Cybersecurity with AI-Led Upgrades

Modern cyber threats are increasing in volume, speed and sophistication, meaning they often outpace human response.

Organisations must embrace AI in cyber defence to enable automated responses, real-time threat detection and the identification of unknown attacks through behavioural analysis. 

In light of this, Fortinet has announced vital improvements to its FortiAI technologies, now integrated across the Fortinet Security Fabric platform.

These updates will ensure the safe use of AI within organisations, boost cyber protection and automate security and network operations.

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 GenAI-enabled services within their organisation.”

The strategic importance of AI in cybersecurity

In cybersecurity, AI is vital to improve how organisations detect and respond to evolving threats. 

Traditional manual defences fail to handle the rising challenges as cybercriminals adopt AI, automation and advanced evasion techniques.

AI will allow enterprises to identify and remove threats in real-time, pointing to a move to proactive security.

Not only will AI minimise human workloads through automation and support continuous adoption to evolving threats, but it will safeguard sensitive information and data to improve organisational trust and compliance.

AI plays a dual role in cybersecurity, acting as a growing threat vector and a vital defence tool.

Fortinet’s advancements in its FortiAI technologies will call upon the capabilities of AI to help automate security and support enterprises to defend against detailed and AI-led cyber threats.

FortiAI innovations

FortiAI has widened to feature the entirety of Fortinet’s AI-led approach across network and security operations.

It offers autonomous capabilities to streamline operations and prevent advanced threats by being integrated with the Fortinet Security Fabric platform. 

FortiAI’s innovations span across two key sections:

FortiAI-Protect 

This innovation utilises AI-led threat detection to enhance security and identify unknown and advanced threats. 

By offering contextual risk assessments, FortiAI-Protect secures access controls for third-party GenAI applications and strengthens security.

New and existing customers can access several capabilities, such as:

• Detect AI application usage for more than 6,500 AI URLs 
• Expand ML and large-scale data analysis to neutralise emerging malware threats bu improving malware protection and threat analysis
• Train the intrusion prevention system (IPS) ML models to detect new attack techniques by enhancing safeguards against complex attacks
• Security teams can block shadow AI or high-risk AI application usage by controlling access and content to GenAI through zero-trust principles
• Utilise threat indicators to refine contextual correlation

FortiAi-Assist 

This innovation simplifies network and security operations with analytics and intelligent automation by integrating agentic AI, GenAI and AIOps. 

The GenAI assistant enhances autonomous network management to create network configuration and security policy updates. 

AIOps and GenAI are utilised to proactively identify and offer remediation of issues before they arise through automated network optimisation and troubleshooting.

Automated alert triage uses factors such as historical patterns and risk to prioritise notifications. This means high-confidence threats directly to the threat analyst or within the system are raised. 

Adaptive threat hunting searches for threats by scanning network traffic, logs and user behaviour.

The innovation calls upon threat intelligence to correlate attack patterns and distribute adversary tactics to enhance security intelligence.

FortiAI-SecureAI will allow organisations to embrace AI, prevent LLM data leakage, maintain data integrity and safeguard AI models. This will mean organisations can secure their infrastructure, AI models and data.

FortiAI enhances strict privacy controls by embracing a multi-layered data protection approach.

 This means data never leaves the network, queries are processed locally and data that is shared with the Fortinet GenAI assistant doesn’t train the LLM.

These new AI-driven innovations in cybersecurity will help to enhance threat detection and response, reduce analyst workload and improve accuracy and threat intelligence to help tackle the rise in complex cyber risks. 

What impact will this have on the cyber industry?

Fortinet’s AI-driven advancements will accelerate the move towards autonomous security, helping to increase efficiency across SOCs and close the skills gap.

By offering tools to protect APIs, AI models and cloud-native workloads, Fortinet highlights the importance of cybersecurity in responsible AI adoption. 

Its AI-led root-cause analysis and contextual correlation will help improve enterprise-grade security platforms and detection precision across the industry.

Fortinet’s improvements will redefine how cyber risk is managed as AI continues to have a transformative impact across several industries. 

Organisations must embrace AI in cybersecurity to enhance organisational strategy, product development and regulatory compliance. 

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