Proofpoint Opens Its Innovation Center in Paris to Showcase How Its Technologies Work

A center dedicated to cybersecurity and meeting with partners and clients. This is the new Proofpoint Innovation Center, an office spread over two floors where the company opens itself to the world and displays what it can do. At the inauguration, which Edge9 attended, the CEO of Proofpoint, Sumit Dhawan, the CFO Rémi Thomas, as well as the director of Clusif (the French equivalent of Italy's Clusit) Florence Puybareau and the director of Les Assises de la Cybersecurité Maria Iacono participated.

The new Proofpoint center is located in a building in Neuilly, just a stone's throw from the Seine and the La Défense district. It's a center born, as CEO Dhawan tells us, because cybersecurity "is an exercise in visualization and strategic learning: we needed to create an innovation center where clients, partners, and Proofpoint could meet to visualize solutions. For this, we created a visual experience, with product demonstrations and touch screens that allow for a direct experience of how products and AI agents work together, and how the ecosystem comes together."

Dhawan states that it is not a space "designed to sell something [to companies]", even if its description inevitably suggests that purpose. This is also because "the center is centrally managed and all our innovation centers around the world are constantly updated on how the world is changing and the scenarios in which we need to share our innovations."

The point is to have a space where clients and partners can have a concrete experience of what is happening in the world of cybersecurity, going beyond theoretical discussions. One could cite Plato and say that the shadows on the cave walls give an idea, but going out and seeing things "in the flesh" helps to truly understand and make them one's own.

"We are trying to create an experience for customers so that they can really understand and visualize what the scenarios they need to worry about in this 'agentic workspace' [in which we are now] are, and how agent-based solutions can help them," concludes Dhawan.

The point that Dhawan has returned to time and again is the deep change brought about by the arrival of not only artificial intelligence but also (and perhaps especially) agents: just as it is possible to deceive people (using social engineering techniques), it is also possible to use techniques to deceive AIs (prompt engineering) and thus gain unauthorized access to data and systems. Therefore, a paradigm shift in cybersecurity is necessary, which can no longer overlook AIs.

This is particularly important given the issue of so-called "shadow AI", or the use of AI applications that are not (explicitly) authorized or centrally controlled by the company, risking exposing data to attacks or uncontrolled dissemination. And it is precisely on this aspect that Proofpoint has been focusing for some time by discussing the "agentic workspace": the idea is that companies are no longer places where there are people on one side and infrastructures on the other, but that there are also AI agents that fall in between and need to be protected just as much as the other two components.

A point emphasized by Iacono is that "cybersecurity is not an area where it is enough to bring technology. Adding one technology to another does nothing but create confusion. Strategy is also needed. And what we have seen over the years is that Proofpoint has helped us help our community [Les Assises is a community of French CISOs that organizes conferences and meetings to improve cybersecurity in France, Ed.] build strategies to grow and move forward."

And the center aims to help companies develop a strategy, using Proofpoint technologies, it goes without saying.