AI and Cybersecurity: A Practical Place to Start
AI is everywhere. We totally get it!
It is in board meetings, sales pitches, product roadmaps and throughout our LinkedIn feeds. Understandably, plenty of businesses are becoming tired of hearing about it.
But that fatigue creates a risk of its own.
We can debate where AI ultimately takes us, how quickly it develops and whether its overall impact will be positive or negative. That is an important conversation, but it is one for another day.
From a cybersecurity perspective, the more immediate point is much simpler: AI has the potential to be extremely damaging, and businesses need to start preparing for that now.
AI security doesn’t have to be intimidating
Most conversations about AI and cybersecurity follow the same pattern.
Hackers can write better phishing emails. Attacks can be automated. Deepfakes are becoming more convincing.
All of that matters, but it is only part of the issue.
AI is also changing what happens inside businesses.
Employees are already using public AI tools to write documents, summarise meetings, analyse information and help with everyday work. Businesses are adding AI features to existing software, often without fully understanding what data those features can access or where that data goes.
AI agents will increasingly connect to company systems, access information and perform actions on behalf of users. In effect, businesses are creating a new category of privileged user—one that can operate at speed and scale, and which may not always behave as expected.
The danger is not simply that criminals will use AI against your business. It is that AI is quietly changing your business’s attack surface before you have had time to understand it.
Waiting for certainty isn’t a strategy
It is easy to delay because AI feels complicated.
The technology is developing quickly. The terminology is confusing. New products appear constantly, and every supplier seems to claim that its platform is now “AI-powered”.
For smaller businesses, it can feel like something that should be dealt with later, once the direction becomes clearer.
But you do not need to understand the eventual outcome of AI to start asking sensible questions:
- Which AI tools are employees already using?
- What company or customer information is being entered into them?
- Which systems now include AI features?
- What information can those features access?
- Are AI-generated actions independently checked?
- Could an attacker impersonate a senior employee, supplier or customer convincingly?
- Are your identity, access and approval controls strong enough for that environment?
These are not futuristic questions. They are practical security questions that businesses can begin answering today.
Start with exposure, not products
The answer is unlikely to be buying the first security tool with “AI” added to its name.
Businesses need advice that begins with their actual exposure: their people, data, systems, suppliers and working practices.
That could mean establishing rules for approved AI use, preventing sensitive information from being entered into public tools, reviewing access permissions, strengthening identity controls or introducing additional verification for payments and sensitive requests.
It may also mean deciding that certain AI tools or use cases are acceptable. The objective should not be to prevent useful innovation. It should be to make conscious decisions about risk instead of allowing those decisions to be made accidentally by individual employees.
Technology will form part of the answer, but it should follow the advice—not replace it.
Doing nothing is still a decision
Businesses don’t need a grand AI transformation programme or an entirely new security stack. They need to understand how AI is already being used, identify where that changes their exposure and introduce sensible boundaries.
The future of AI may remain uncertain, but securing its use can begin today.
If you’re unsure where to start, ITB can help you understand how AI is affecting your security and identify the practical steps worth taking.