Move Over, Legacy Security: SentinelOne’s Purple AI Challenges the Status Quo

The battleground for cybersecurity is evolving rapidly, as threat actors become more sophisticated and increasingly leverage AI to launch large-scale, intelligent attacks that can cripple essential digital infrastructure. Today, CISOs face an uphill battle in implementing digital guardrails to protect the enterprise ecosystem. With data being accessed through a variety of form factors—from endpoint devices to enterprise servers—managing and securing these access points has become an increasingly complex challenge.

The message on the wall is clear: the attackers are becoming faster, smarter, and harder to trace. And defenders? They’re stretched thinner than ever.

Recently, in a media roundtable, SentinelOne, the developer of AI-powered cybersecurity platform built on the first unified Data Lake, said that it helps secure enterprise digital assets by creating intelligent, data-driven systems that think for themselves, stay ahead of complexity and risk, and evolve on their own.

What the company is essentially saying is this: what if cybersecurity wasn’t just about defence? What if it could think, act, and respond faster than the threat itself? The company says that’s its vision.

Why Legacy Security Just Doesn’t Cut It Anymore

“Cyberattacks aren’t what they used to be,” says Diwakar Dayal, Managing Director & Area Vice President – India & SAARC, SentinelOne. “It’s no longer about malware hidden in a shady email. Now, it’s AI-generated, automation-driven, and mostly invisible to traditional tools.”

The numbers tell the story: nearly 79% of modern threats are malware-free, bypassing outdated antivirus systems. Attackers use legitimate tools already present in systems (so-called Living-Off-The-Land tactics), and lateral movement, once taking hours or days, now happens in under 48 minutes.

Defenders are up against relentless, low-cost, AI-boosted attacks. And conventional SOC (Security Operations Centre) teams can barely keep up. To bring method to the madness, the company says it first created Purple AI, pegged as a groundbreaking generative-AI-powered threat-hunting tool within SentinelOne’s Singularity platform. Recently, the company launched its next generation – Purple AI Athena.

Purple AI: Not a Tool, But a Teammate

At the time of its launch recently at RSA Conference 2025, Tomer Weingarten, co-founder and CEO of SentinelOne, said, “AI and automation have long held the promise of fundamentally transforming security operations and supercharging analysts to detect and respond at machine speed to threats from even the most sophisticated nation-state adversaries and cybercriminals. It’s the industry’s first true end-to-end agentic AI cybersecurity platform built on over a decade of security expertise, and we’re bringing it to all security data in the modern SOC.”

“By delivering agentic AI automation and orchestration capable of reasoning and responding like an advanced security analyst, we believe humans get empowered even more as they assume supervision of these systems – an important role that will also shape the coming generation of security service providers,” adds Weingarten.

At the media roundtable, Dayal deep-dived into what Purple AI can do. He said, “Think of it less as a bot and more as your smartest teammate. Purple AI investigates threats, understands context, and responds in real time.”

What does this approach lead to? The company says it’s a significant leap from reactive security to real-time, autonomous defence. For resource-constrained teams, it’s like adding an army of intelligent analysts overnight.

Is This India’s AI-Ready Security Moment?

SentinelOne firmly believes that the transformation is already underway in India. From pharma to financial services, Indian enterprises are embracing AI-native platforms and moving away from legacy security tools that can’t keep up.

Dayal gave the impressive customer adoption curve for Purple AI. He says, “We have customers like Credit Saison, Quantiphi, AllCargo, and TeamLease who are seeing real impact: faster threat response, seamless AV migration, and greater visibility across sprawling cloud and hybrid environments.”

The company is also aggressively targeting India’s ambitious, cloud-native unicorns and forward-looking mid-sized businesses. The appeal lies in speed, simplicity, and trust – the holy trinity of modern cybersecurity.

Deepening its Cadence in India

SentinelOne’s playbook in India goes deeper than just customer wins. The company has invested in local infrastructure, including a data centre compliant with Indian regulatory frameworks, to enable data localisation and sovereignty.

Its local team spans engineering, R&D, threat intelligence, DFIR (Digital Forensics & Incident Response), and customer success, making India not just a growth market, but a strategic innovation and support hub.

SentinelOne is also actively partnering with top Indian system integrators, cyber insurers, and MSSPs to build a stronger, more resilient ecosystem. As India charts its journey towards a $1 trillion digital economy, the company sees itself as a core enabler of digital trust.

Taming Threats, Onboarding Trust: The Road Ahead

Going by Dayal’s insights, the company’s north star is simple, yet bold: security should be proactive, not reactive. Autonomous, not manual. Built on intelligence, and rooted in trust. As Dayal puts it, “Cybersecurity shouldn’t slow you down. It should set you free.”

And in India and beyond, SentinelOne is helping businesses do just that.