Transcript
I'll say that again because my mic was off. Good morning, everybody. How are you doing? Excited? How many jet-lagged people we have in the audience today? Many. Me too. I slept on the sofa this evening, last night. So, great. We're here in sunny Las Vegas. Really excited to be here. And after hearing Ken's presentation and talking about technology and Christiana's on how finance can help that capacity, my job this morning is to introduce what you're going to see in the next two days. A little bit more details. So, set the scene for the 2026 Accelerate. But just before I start, now, some of you, quite a lot of you may know that I've been in this company nearly two decades. And I've seen a lot of keynote speeches from Ken, right? I've seen a lot of them. We've been doing this for like 20 years. And every time I see Ken, there's always one thing that's very particular and consistent about his keynotes. Anybody want to guess? And it's not the fact that he's always well-dressed and he's my boss. Not the reason. Anyone want to guess? Anybody want to guess? Come on. Innovation. Innovation. So, it's incredible how in the last 25 years, Ken and Michael, obviously, I have to give Michael his credits too, have brought so much innovation to the market. It's truly, truly incredible. Now, think about it. 25 years ago, we had no clouds, right? No AI revolution. Even the smartphones weren't about. We're using smartphones every day of our lives today. And the cyber threats were just a fraction of what we see today. Yet, through all of these changes, one thing remained constant in Fortinet, and that's innovation. And fast-forward innovation. And that's the theme of the 2026 Accelerate. So, I want to publicly thank Ken. Unfortunately, he's in the backstage. I was hoping he was going to be out here. I want to thank him personally for building not only a great company with a great culture, but for allowing us as Fortineters and you, our partners and customers, to have the opportunity to build some of the world's greatest cybersecurity and make this world a safer place. Let's give him a round of applause, please. Okay. That saved my job for another 12 months at least. Thank you so much. Great. So, the big transformation. As I said, I'm going to talk about why we need to transform. Why we need a big transformation. And I'm going to do it in perfect Simon Sinek style. Start with the why. Why we are here. Our purpose, our cause, our beliefs. And I'm going to ask the question, why do we need to transform? And I'm going to try and answer those for you as we go through my presentation. So, the first one. You heard it from Ken. AI driven threats require AI protection. And we're going to hear a lot about AI in the next coming days. It's going to be one of the main themes of the event. Now, human versus machine is gone. The Kevin Miknicks of the world are not there anymore. We are talking today about machine versus machine. The bad guys have mastered AI. And you'll see how we've built in the last few years, and as Ken mentioned, over 500 patents around AI. You're going to see how we've built AI for security and more recently security for AI. Protecting LLMs, protecting prompts and SLMs. This is a new thing. The small agents. The small agentic agents. And then we're going to have to look at how we introduce a defensive AI framework that not only talks about technology, but also talks about operations, strategy, compliance. It's extremely important. And last but not least, the AI security has become a board priority. Extremely important. The second why. New realities rule. What do I mean by that? We've just kicked off 2026, and there's been a further explosion of attacks on critical infrastructures and operational technology. Just in the last 12 to 18 months, it's tripled. And with the recent situation across the Middle East, we've seen a surge on attacks, not only in the Middle East, but across the globe on our critical infrastructures. And clearly, geopolitics do not help. They create uncertainty. I was one of the people that got caught up in the Middle East and couldn't get back home over the last weekend. So, very, very frightening. And that leads me to clouds, to sovereignty. You heard it from Ken. Sovereignty is going to be the next big thing. We're going to see how Fortinet has been building sovereign clouds, sovereign SASE, and how that is all going to be integrated into our new platforms and fabrics. And last but not least, the human dimension. Skills. Now, Fortinet every year does a survey around skills and skill shortages. And 2025, we did the same. And again, we've seen an increase in the shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals across the globe. We're talking now about 4 million people. Now, you all probably thought, I don't know how many people thought that Claude was going to take over our jobs. I didn't, to be frank. But 4 million people, that's a hell of a lot of shortage, skill shortage on the market. It's a city like Los Angeles. So today, the question is not whether we have a security strategy in place. It's whether we have the people that can bring that strategy to life. Now, of course, AI can help. You're going to hear about FortiAI Assist and our security operations. Ken mentioned it. We've created a platform, FortiSOC, that's consolidating a number of products. But the good thing is that we need your help, and we need to act fast. So to wrap up, I have two minutes left. What are the key takeaways we want you to bring home in the next two days? We're in Vegas. I'm not going to use the usual cliche, but we're in Vegas, and people normally come here to do one thing, right? Or maybe more than one thing, but one thing, which is gamble, right? They like casinos, and they go and they play and whatever. But cybersecurity is not a gamble. We cannot gamble with cybersecurity. We need to transform. You need to transform. Threats are evolving. AI has become democratized, and it's democratized threats. Sovereign is key, as I said. Over the next decade, we're going to see sovereign, especially across Europe and APAC, really kick in. And the pillars of your business model are changing, so you need to change with them. Now Fortinet is here today to help. And Accelerate has been designed to help you create that value that I was talking about at the beginning of my presentation. So with that, I wish you all a wonderful Accelerate 2026. Enjoy the event, enjoy the place, enjoy the sun, and enjoy the information that we're going to throw. Thank you so much.
