Palo Alto Networks announced it has acquired the AI automation startup Console to expand what AI agents can do inside its Cortex security platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The company said it plans to bring Console’s technology into Cortex to help security teams investigate activity, prioritize work and take action across their environments. Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto CEO, said Console will let customers interact directly with data and build agentic workflows in natural language to automatically identify and remediate issues.
Console built its platform around automating IT operations. Its AI agents can work across identity services, devices and applications to handle tasks such as provisioning accounts, changing access permissions and managing employee offboarding. Console also supports integrations with applications including Okta, Microsoft 365, Slack and GitHub.
The startup has since expanded that approach into security. Console says its agents can collect context for incident response, assess whether an organization is affected by a vulnerability, manage access reviews and carry out configured response actions. The platform can interpret a requested outcome, determine the steps needed to complete it, and run the workflow using connected apps and existing organizational policies.
That capability overlaps with technology Palo Alto already offers. Cortex AgentiX, unveiled last year as the next generation of its XSOAR security orchestration platform, lets security teams build agents that can reason, plan and execute workflows. Palo Alto says AgentiX incorporates more than 1,300 existing automation playbooks, more than 1,100 integrations and support for MCP.
Palo Alto has not yet detailed how Console’s technology will differ from or combine with those existing capabilities. The company’s announcement highlighted making Cortex easier to operate through natural language and giving agents more autonomy in the enterprise. Console could make Cortex more valuable for post-investigation work, like revoking access and revising account permissions.
Giving agents more autonomy to make changes to enterprise applications and infrastructure also raises the stakes when an agent makes a bad decision or receives a malicious instruction. Console says its agents do not receive write access to connected systems by default. Administrators must explicitly configure actions before an agent can make changes, and the platform supports scoped permissions, approval requirements, audit logs and escalation to humans.
Palo Alto announced the Console acquisition alongside strong fourth quarter financial results. Revenue reached $3.41 billion, exceeding analysts’ estimate of $3.35 billion, while adjusted earnings of $1.02 per share also beat expectations. The company forecast fiscal 2027 revenue of $14.10 billion to $14.20 billion, above the $13.79 billion analysts had expected, according to Reuters. With revenue and earnings still growing, Palo Alto is continuing to add capabilities around Cortex, and Console could give it a stronger foothold in the operational side of agentic security.