Bharti Airtel, Zscaler Launch India-focused AI & Cyber Threat Research Center Zscaler will also deploy a specialized threat research team focused on India.
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India's telco giant Bharti Airtel on Friday announced a partnership with global cloud security firm Zscaler to launch an 'AI & Cyber Threat Research Center - India', a digital initiative aimed at strengthening the country's cyber resilience as well as push trusted AI adoption.
The collaboration also focuses on protecting sectors, industries and assets that are essential to India's economic and national security, such as telecommunications, banking, and energy.
Zscaler in a joint press release noted that its research arm ThreatLabz India has detected millions of infiltration attempts each month. These include nation-state cyber espionage activities, attempts to breach India's private and public sectors, with 1.2 million intrusion attempts originating from 20,000 sources targeting 58 Indian digital entities; and a surge in zero-day exploit attempts aimed at multiple industries in India.
The security firm added that as threats are becoming more sophisticated, it was important to explore methods beyond the conventional perimeter-based security models.
As far as the AI & Cyber Threat Research Center – India goes, it will be focusing on four key areas - protection (providing real-time intelligence for digital businesses), remediate (allying with government agencies to thwart attacks), facilitate (promoting zero-trust architecture and AI-based defences), and ultimately, build (developing a skilled workforce with specialised certifications).
Zscaler will leverage its global intelligence whereas Airtel will use its local operational reach to build an efficient response mechanism to such attacks. Zscaler will also deploy a specialized threat research team focused on India.
"This team will leverage the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform, which processes over 500 billion daily transactions, to extract threat intelligence to secure India's public and private sectors. Airtel will contribute deep visibility into IoT and mobile traffic, collaborating with
Zscaler to monitor networks and develop new solutions, enabling faster identification of suspicious activity and more effective coordination with ecosystem stakeholders," the companies said in the release.
The alliance will also look to onboard additional members from India's critical public and private sectors in the near future.
"At Airtel, our commitment has been to safeguard our customers and the nation's digital fabric. This partnership with Zscaler marks a significant extension of this commitment that will combine the power of our AI capabilities and deep scale for cybersecurity research to protect the country's expanding digital ecosystem," said Gopal Vittal, Executive Vice-Chairman, Bharti Airtel.
"We will focus on addressing challenges unique to our market to build a safer, more resilient digital India where every citizen and enterprise can connect and thrive with confidence. Our research-backed preventive mechanism will also encourage peaceful and secure engagements on digital platforms."
Cybersecurity remains a major focus for both private and public sectors, a theme that has also been highlighted at the current AI summit.
For instance, the Agentic AI Roundtable during India AI Impact Summit 2026 focused on how the transition to deploying autonomous agents for complicated tasks is redefining safety, accountability, cybersecurity, and public trust.
In October last year, Airtel's business arm bagged a multi-year contract from the Indian Railway Security Operations Centre (IRSOC) to provide advanced cybersecurity solutions for the digital infrastructure of Indian Railways. Under the contract, Airtel will provide security across 26 locations. The architecture also includes real-time monitoring, AI-based threat detection, and more.
