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Cloudflare says it experiences 234 billion cyber threats every day, and the $100 billion cybersecurity company faces an onslaught from leaner companies.
Last May, Cloudflare laid off about 20% of its workforce, specifically because of artificial intelligence, and has been hit hard in areas such as finance, revenue operations, marketing operations, and recruiting, where up to four roles were suddenly reduced to one. The role of AI will also become more pervasive across core cybersecurity operations. Michelle Zatlin, co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Cloudflare, predicts that within five years, 95% of cybersecurity will be handled by AI.
The 234 billion attacks “just make you realize how crazy the internet is,” Zatlin told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on the latest episode of the CNBC Changemakers podcast.
In the short term, the security environment will worsen further. “It’s going to be very noisy,” she said.
But within five years, Zatlin predicts that 95% of attacks will be handled by AI. “We’re going to get to a point where things are going to be a lot better, because ultimately the code is going to be secure by design, and we don’t have to worry about it after the fact, and it’s going to be more embedded in everything, and it’s just going to be safer for both all businesses and people. … But we have to get there from here,” she said.
As Cloudflare reimagines the “factory floor,” which Zatlin called a process of re-evaluating what the workforce and workplace should look like for the future of AI, she has two pieces of advice for those seeking a career in cybersecurity or other fields. They are “construction” and “sales”.
“Architecture is a really good thing to lean into,” Zatlin says. “For our sellers, I think business is still being done in between relationships, so it’s really important to invest there,” she added.
Zatlin said Cloudflare continues to hire for and invest in these build and sell roles, adding that it is also focusing more on “some of the connective tissue” within the organization, workers who can bridge these functions. “And perhaps it’s a framework you can use yourself,” she said.
In a world where AI is transforming operations across enterprises in every sector of the economy, the role of engineering is increasingly blurring into that of sales, including through the development of what the world’s largest AI companies such as AWS, Anthropic, and OpenAI now call “forward deployment engineers.”
I think it’s going to be really important in the next 10 years that we’re all builders and sellers.
There is every reason to remain concerned about software development and cybersecurity jobs, even though many students have been driven to these fields as solid professional career opportunities for decades. Already, there is a sharp decline in the number of software developers aged 22 to 25, with research showing that jobs exposed to AI are being affected more broadly. But Zatlin says students who fear the AI-era workforce should flip the script and consider themselves lucky to be so early in their career paths because “everything is changing.”
And within Cloudflare, builders and sellers remain “powerful,” she says.
This is a model of employee development and learning that the company has emphasized in its internship program, which is expected to involve more than 1,100 employees this year, approximately 25% of companies with fewer than 5,000 employees, and the largest number of interns the company has ever hosted.
“The idea of being a builder is the right way of thinking, and I think both of those are here to stay, whether you’re using Vibecoding or actually being an engineer. But how do you build something? How do you ship something, as opposed to overseeing it or having someone else do it?”
“Even if it’s just a prototype to show traction or a ‘version 1’. Then you scale it up in a more operational way. You don’t have to do it all, but I think the builders, the doers, do it really well,” she said. “They’re learning, they’re shipping, they’re contributing, and this is a really positive flywheel,” she said of the 2026 interns.
In Cloudflare’s view, the people who ultimately have the “most ownership” of the workforce are the people who build it.
“Those are going to be the most positive ones. They’re going to be almost best sellers. And if you’re in the business of selling something, the closer you get to building things, the better. So I think it’s going to be really important in the next 10 years that we’re all builders and sellers,” Zatlin said.
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