Why AI will increase cybersecurity spending 1

AI is certainly affecting many tasks. However as of today, 2024 the genAI tools adoption is relatively low. As an example, chatGPT in the US has been used once for about 10% of the working population. 

Not that much.

There is another ‘working’ population instead, that is jumping on AI en masse.

Cyber criminals adoption is definitely higher than 10%. I have not the figures, but probably close to 90%.

Today there are many tools that can make you simulate the voice of another person, producing videos with that person and fake its most intimate relatives with such materials.

And that’s for people. You can relatively easily create bots for automated network cyber attacks or other with real time adaptation and reaction (with reinforcement learning or other techniques).

Few examples.

-In March 2024 a Singaporean accountant was fooled by a fake video of his CFO to release 1m to another bank account.  

-in May 2024 Warren Buffet, the famous investor, admitted his relatives watched an experimental fake video of him asking for money. None of them actually could detect the video was fake. 

-OECD, the international organisation, tracks an index of AI related incident reports (mostly related to cyber attacks). The index skyrocketed in the last year.

Sorry to give you bad news: this is just the start.

So what is the commercial implication of this?

Cybersecurity spending has to increase drastically.

While I am not sure that many AI, especially narrow AI, startups will survive in this environment, certainly many cybersecurity companies (from training to specific cyber products) will increase revenue.

In my mind, AI as an industry of providers is naturally set for few winners to take it all while the cybersecurity industry is much more variegated. 

Yes of course there are the big players in cybersecurity: however it is hard that a leading company in Antiviruses and related security products is also leading in identification and SIEM systems. 

It is ironic: AI success will not bring more AI companies to success but.. More cybersecurity companies to succeed.

And the more AI improves, the more cyber criminals will be effective the more the cybersecurity industry will grow.

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