CISOs have a short -term opportunity to become a trusted partner, helping the teams to maximize the value creation potential of AI tools they seek to implement. Helping the company to deploy with confidence AI can move the perception of the cybersecurity of a team that slows down a person who allows a confident adoption of technology at an accelerated pace. By setting up processes that integrate cyber-TOBLE, other functions will gain efficiency by minimizing budgetary problems or delays.
The integration of cyber into AI initiatives is an opportunity for cyber-functional to expand their influence through the organization. The main cyber-teams show that their contribution can shed better decisions over everything, acquisitions to the governance of the supply chain. A CISO is deeply involved in the holistic assessment of acquisition objectives, which is more and more important given the increased appetite of CEOs for mergers and acquisitions in 2024.8 The same CISO strengthens shareholders by providing information and insurance concerning the capacity of the company to protect their information. Likewise, Annanthapavan and his Anz team provide a strategic threat intelligence that feeds commercial decision -making.
A CISO emphasizes how cybersecurity can stimulate sales and increase results by creating confidence with customers. “You have a number of customers who are increasingly focusing on certifications, questionnaires, verification that their suppliers respect a certain level of diligence and that we demonstrate that we do so, either to keep existing customers, or to open new markets for us, in which case, we should be able to quantify this for the company.”
AI also allows cyber-function to make decisions and carry out analyzes more quickly, rationalize processes for cost savings and reduce the need for additional employees. This can be essential to comply with regulatory requests, but also to quickly respond to market opportunities.
Actions for Cisos:
- Establish the principles of the AI and the railings to support the experiment: as companies experiment quickly and adopt AI, it is essential for CISOs to move quickly to protect and accelerate the innovation rate.
- Help the company get use cases to market more quickly: develop a set of architectures, integration models and preconfigured and pre-sanctioned technology components to support business use. Be secure by designing the fastest road to the market in your organization.
- Activation of the target cyber: Take advantage of a practical security and risk framework for AI to help arrive at “yes” for the company while remaining in the tolerances of risk reversing the perception that cybersecurity is the department of prevention of companies.
- Keep the visibility of the AI attack surface and the third -party ecosystem: many ciso have spent a lot of time in front of their advice and their management teams to respond to third -party data violations. Our research has shown that secure creators have strategies in place to manage all cyber risk through the attack surface and their third party ecosystem. The expansion to cover new AI attack areas will allow organizations to adopt AI with confidence.
Although the main organizations are enthusiastic about the integration of AI for cybersecurity, they are still in the early stages to bring cybersecurity through the company when it implements AI. The most successful CISOs will be those who will be able to articulate the value of cybersecurity for the company in the AI era, beyond the close definitions of security, giving the confidence of the companies they can safely adopt AI.
Annmarie Pino, associate director, Ey Insights, Ernst & Young LLP; Michael Wheelock, associate director, Ey Insights, Ernst & Young LLP and Ryan Gavin, supervised partner, Ey Insights, contributed to this article.