Joshua Tilton: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just want to clarify quickly. Did the macro impacts that you saw in 4Q actually get worse in 1Q. And then could you just remind us what exactly is baked into that full year guidance that you reiterated today in terms of your expectations for the macro environment for the rest of the year?
Gil Shwed: So I think from Q4 to Q1, the situation became a little bit worse in what — in the internal trends that we’ve seen. But I think also we had a very tough compare because Q1 last year was an exceptional quarter. I think in terms of the internal metrics that we have Q1 of 2022 was the exceptional quarter that I don’t think we saw in a decade. So the compare is tough. I think for the full year, there’s really no change. I mean, when we did the forecast for the year, we were a little bit more optimistic in terms of the preparing the plan for the year than we are now. But I think we’re still in the range and we still hope to deliver on that. And there is a lot of expectation for improvement in the second half that would put us in the upper end of the range, but there’s also risks involved, so we have to remember that.
Joshua Tilton: Thanks, guys.
Kip Meintzer: Thanks, Josh. Next up is Brad Zelnick followed by Ray McDonough.
Brad Zelnick: Great. Thanks so much for taking the question. Gil, I’ve always appreciated the vision that you have within cybersecurity. Any thoughts on the impact of generative AI on the space and in particular, how it might be used by both good and bad actors. Thanks.
Gil Shwed: Absolutely. That’s a subject that we are very busy with. I think AI, in general, is something that we’ve been investing in the last few years. And generative AI, that’s in the market now for like five months, I think it’s really creating a change in everything in technology. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a real change revolution in technology or not, but I believe in it. I think it has the potential to be one of the biggest revolution that we saw. We are in the kind of in the middle of the change. So too early to say. Now it has an effect. It has a big effect on cybersecurity. And I don’t think that we can even comprehend the effect of a change. We’ve shown already in December where researchers showed how you can use generative AI to write which, again, have access to all the code repositories, it can take hold from them and without being a security expert, right, sophisticated malware.
If you’re talking about phishing attack, which are fairly common actually, e-mail and fishing attacks are the number one entry points of attacks into organization, which plays into our Harmony E-mail, but when you look into them, when you look at most phishing e-mails, you see that we don’t have the perfect English or the perfect other language. And you can spot that with generative AI, it become seconds to write a very convincing fishing e-mail. You can link that e-mail with code, let’s say, collect customer information, collect personal information. Again, this code can be written by the generative AI. And you don’t have to be a real expert, you actually get all the instruction from the generative AI how to create this kind of code. So this is pretty scary about access to malicious things.
