Zscaler Inc. has partnered with Bharti Airtel to launch an AI & Cyber Threat Research Centre in India, marking a significant step in strengthening the country’s digital security architecture amid rising AI-driven cyber risks.
The multi-stakeholder initiative is designed to bolster national cyber resilience and safeguard critical sectors such as telecommunications, banking, energy and other essential services that underpin India’s economic and national security. It also aims to accelerate the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence across India’s fast-expanding digital ecosystem.
Bharti Airtel executive vice- chairman Gopal Vittal said the partnership reinforces Airtel’s commitment to protecting customers and the nation’s digital fabric by combining AI capabilities and large-scale cybersecurity research.
India has long served as a strategic innovation and research hub for Zscaler, with a substantial share of its global research talent based in the country. The new centre expands Zscaler’s footprint into a broader national collaboration platform, bringing together private enterprises, government agencies, academia and public institutions under a unified cybersecurity framework.
Positioned as an “In India, For India” initiative, the centre seeks to reinforce cyber defences at a time when the country is undergoing a generational digital transformation. Unlike traditional enterprise-scale deployments, India’s digital infrastructure is being built at population scale, significantly widening the national attack surface.
At the same time, cyber threats are evolving at machine speed. Zscaler’s research arm in India has recorded millions of infiltration attempts each month, including nation-state espionage campaigns exploiting regional geopolitical tensions, over 1.2 million intrusion attempts from 20,000 sources targeting 58 Indian digital entities, and a surge in zero-day exploit attacks across industries.
The companies said these trends underline the inadequacy of legacy perimeter-based security systems and highlight the need for secure-by-design, zero trust architectures in an increasingly borderless and AI-enabled threat environment.
Zscaler CEO, chairman and founder Jay Chaudhry said India’s population-scale digital ambitions require a modern Zero Trust architecture rather than legacy firewalls and VPNs, adding that the new centre will harness the world’s largest security cloud and local expertise to stay ahead of emerging threats.
The AI & Cyber Threat Research Centre will operate on four strategic pillars: delivering real-time threat intelligence to protect national digital assets; partnering with government agencies to remediate and neutralise attacks; facilitating adoption of AI-driven security frameworks and Zero Trust architecture; and building a future-ready cybersecurity talent pipeline through specialised certifications to bridge the skills gap.
As founding members, Zscaler and Airtel will combine global threat intelligence with local network visibility to create a faster research-to-response loop. Zscaler will deploy a dedicated India-focused threat research team leveraging its Zero Trust Exchange platform, which processes more than 500 billion daily transactions, to extract actionable intelligence. Airtel will contribute deep visibility into mobile and IoT traffic, enabling early detection of suspicious activity and coordinated response across stakeholders.
The centre plans to induct additional public and private sector members over time, expanding collaboration to strengthen India’s cyber resilience as it advances toward a secure and digitally self-reliant future.