Guest: Rupesh Chokshi (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai
Show Name: Secure By Design
Topic: Agentic AI

Is the rise of agentic AI truly a doomsday scenario for existing business models? Rupesh Chokshi, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Application Security at Akamai, says no. Drawing from decades of experience navigating internet transformations, he explains why today’s AI disruption follows a familiar pattern. Enterprises that survived e-commerce, mobile, and streaming revolutions have a playbook for the AI era. The key is understanding how to participate in the agentic AI ecosystem rather than fighting against it.

The Pattern of Technology Disruption

Every major technology shift triggers the same fear cycle. When e-commerce emerged, everyone predicted the death of brick and mortar retail. When mobile exploded, desktop was supposed to disappear. When streaming launched, linear TV was finished. None of these predictions came true in the absolute way people imagined. Instead, smart enterprises figured out hybrid models. They identified new value propositions. They adapted rather than resisted.

Chokshi sees the same pattern unfolding with AI. Major players like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Perplexity, and ByteDance are crawling and scraping web content at unprecedented scale. Enterprises face a choice. They can view this as theft and fight it. Or they can figure out how to participate in this new ecosystem and capture value from it.

The Agentic AI Future

The real transformation comes with agentic workflows. Chokshi describes a near future where AI agents handle complex multi-step transactions on behalf of humans. Imagine telling an AI to plan your Fiji vacation with specific dates, flexible options, and hotel requirements. The agent searches, compares, builds an itinerary, provides pricing, and books everything with your approval. This represents a fundamental shift in how commerce operates.

For enterprises, this means rethinking customer engagement entirely. If an AI agent is researching products and making purchase decisions, your content and systems need to serve that agent effectively. Traditional marketing funnels built for human browsing behavior won’t work. The speed of commerce will accelerate dramatically. The ease of completing complex transactions will improve. Businesses that adapt their systems for agentic AI interactions will capture this opportunity.

The Risks Nobody Can Ignore

Chokshi balances optimism with caution. AI hallucination remains a serious concern. He shares an example of someone using an AI travel planner that generated a complete itinerary. Most of it worked perfectly. But somewhere the AI hallucinated and created a fictional mountain destination that didn’t exist. The traveler discovered this mistake only after attempting to visit.

This highlights the dual challenge. Simple hallucinations create user frustration and erode trust. But more sophisticated trickery poses genuine threats. Bad actors will use AI to extract value, steal data, or harvest PII information while masquerading as legitimate agentic workflows. Enterprises need robust security and fraud prevention built specifically for AI-driven interactions.

The hybrid future requires balancing accessibility for legitimate AI agents with protection against abuse. Companies that solve this challenge will lead their industries. Those that ignore these risks will face significant consequences.

Learning from History

Akamai has pioneered internet infrastructure through every major transformation. The company survived the dot-com crash, scaled through the e-commerce explosion, adapted to mobile-first traffic patterns, and enabled the streaming revolution. Each transition brought predictions of doom for existing business models. Each time, smart enterprises found ways to thrive.

The AI transformation follows this same arc. It demands strategic thinking about value creation and value capture in a fundamentally different environment. It requires investing in new capabilities while protecting core assets. Most importantly, it needs leadership willing to embrace change rather than deny it.

Chokshi’s perspective offers reassurance grounded in experience. This is not the first time technology has threatened to upend established business models. It won’t be the last. The enterprises that succeed will be those that study the patterns of past disruptions, adapt their strategies intelligently, and move quickly to participate in the emerging ecosystem.