Remember when Zero Trust was the hottest topic in cybersecurity? Conference keynotes, vendor pitches, and LinkedIn posts all proclaimed it as the future of security architecture. Then artificial intelligence burst onto the scene, and suddenly everyone pivoted. Zero Trust became yesterday's cybersecurity conversation, replaced by breathless discussions about AI-powered threats, machine learning detection, and autonomous security agents. But here's the uncomfortable truth: While we've been chasing the shiny object that is AI, the fundamental problems that Zero Trust was designed to solve have only gotten worse. In fact, the rise of AI hasn't made Zero Trust architecture obsolete; it's made it absolutely critical . The Zero Trust basics still apply Let's revisit the fundamentals. Zero Trust is a term coined by John Kindervag at Forrester Research in 2010 and later championed by advocates like Dr. Chase Cunningham.…