Axios Live: AI is rapidly reshaping the cybersecurity landscape, industry leaders say
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Axios' Sam Sabin engaging with the roundtable group. Photo: Chris Constantine for Axios
SAN FRANCISCO – Cybersecurity risks are becoming more complex as AI adoption outpaces governance, leaders said at an Expert Voices roundtable last week.
Why it matters: As AI becomes embedded in business operations, organizations are determining how to build internal frameworks that meet fast-evolving compliance standards without slowing innovation.
Axios' Sam Sabin and Chris Metinko moderated the March 24 roundtable discussion, which was sponsored by Optro.
Here are 5 takeaways from the conversation.
- "What we've been seeing for some time is that as people move to the cloud, the complexity has gotten to a point where how we traditionally did security does not scale," Wiz global head of government affairs Mitch Herckis said. "AI has just added gasoline on that fire, essentially."
- AI has accelerated bad actors' ability to exploit vulnerabilities, said Eric Wenger, Cisco senior director for cyber and emerging tech policy. "In 2018, they said the average time … from disclosure or vulnerability to exploit was 63 days. In 2023, that had dropped to five days."
- "I'm starting to see the beginning of a trend: people are starting to wake up because of the threat of AI, they're starting to look [internally] a little bit more about accepting the fact that there's a pretty good chance of getting a breach," Illumio public sector chief technology officer Gary Barlet said.
- "I'm going to be honest that many companies are going to accept that risk … the cost day to day is the cost of doing business," said Alex Rose, Sophos global head of government partnerships and CTU threat research director, on today's risk landscape.
- "While the public discourse now is about who should regulate … I think the more important question that we have to be contributing to as an industry is how AI should be regulated," said Sezaneh Seymour, Coalition vice president and head of regulatory risk and policy.
Content from the sponsor's remarks:
In her introductory remarks, Optro chief marketing officer April Crichlow said we're "at an inflection point" in the AI landscape.
- "AI adoption is increasing faster than governance frameworks," Crichlow said.
- Community is a big part of having a real conversation about what it takes to meet this AI moment, she said, noting that the conversation goal that night was to foster that community.
