Palo Alto Networks buys Console to strengthen agentic security on its Cortex platform

Palo Alto Networks has announced the acquisition of Console, a company specializing in AI-native IT service management and automation technology. According to the company, Console's technology will be integrated into Cortex, its security operations platform, to expand its agentic AI capabilities and enable security teams to investigate alerts, prioritize tasks and automate actions more quickly across their networked environments.

Console's technology works by connecting to each customer's identity systems, SaaS applications, security tools and other key systems. From there, its AI agents are able to understand a request, gather the necessary context, execute a workflow and document what happened, thereby automating operational tasks that until now required manual intervention.

Andrei Serban, CEO and co-founder of Console, explained that the company was built on a simple idea: that people should be able to state an operational goal and let intelligent software handle the complexity required to achieve it. According to Serban, its customers have already shown that agents can dramatically reduce workloads and transform the business.

For his part, Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, said that adding Console will allow customers to hold a direct conversation with their data and build agentic workflows in natural language that help alert on and remediate incidents automatically. Arora described the move as a step toward 'software as an agent', giving the company's platform 'arms and legs' to deliver autonomous security outcomes across the enterprise.

The deal comes amid a recent run of significant purchases by Palo Alto Networks in the security and AI space. In January of this year the company completed its acquisition of cloud observability platform Chronosphere for $3.35 billion, and in February it closed the purchase of CyberArk for $25 billion. In April it picked up endpoint security startup Koi for an estimated $400 million, and in May it completed the acquisition of Portkey, a firm specializing in AI agent security.

In Console's case, the financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The article offers no further details on the expected closing date, the size of Console's team or the exact scope of the technical integration with Cortex, so those aspects remain pending future communications from the company.