As AI gets smarter, AI-powered cybersecurity attacks are getting faster and more complex.

On Wednesday, EY published a study finding that, among the 500 senior corporate security leaders surveyed, 96% say AI-enabled cybersecurity attacks are a significant threat to their organizations, and 48% attribute one-quarter of their cybersecurity incidents in the past year to AI.

This perception is rooted in reality, as AI is responsible for creating more sophisticated attacks, as Ganesh Devarajan of EY Americas Consulting Cyber Risk Practice told The Deep View.

“We are seeing a high-stakes crossroads where AI is weaponizing the digital landscape just as it fortifies defenses,” Ganesh Devarajan, EY Americas Consulting Cyber Risk Practice Leader, told The Deep View. “The velocity and sophistication of attacks have scaled in a way that traditional manual defenses struggle to match.”

Despite the imminent threat, the leaders found they were ill-equipped to meet it, with less than half reporting being strongly confident in their organization’s ability to defend against a major security breach enabled by AI. The solution seems to lie in AI: 99% believe that its strategic use will transform their organization’s proactive and defensive cybersecurity strategies.

As a result, companies are leading towards a more aggressive defensive approach, leading to major changes in budgets:

• 85% of leaders surveyed said their current budget is insufficient to meet the needs of AI-enabled threats
• Organizations spending at least a quarter of their cybersecurity budget on AI solutions are going to quintuple in two years
• The share will grow from only 9% of the total cybersecurity budget on AI solutions to a whopping 48% of organizational spending during the aforementioned two-year period

Increasing budgets is a sound defense strategy for staying protected because, according to Devarajan, the manual security processes in place cannot keep pace with AI-driven threats. Furthermore, he explains that by shifting capital, companies move from a reactive posture to a more transformative one.

Another way to justify the cost of AI-driven defenses is to examine the cost of AI solutions, as DJ Sampath, SVP, AI Software and Platform, at Cisco, highlighted. He compared it to buying an expensive piece of tech equipment, which you would want to insure to protect the investment.

“When you're going to go out and introduce AI, or a very expensive thing inside of your system, it's going to touch every single part of your organization,” said Sampath. “You better make sure that you have the right kind of security and safety strategy in place, and if that means spending a little bit more, you’ll want to do that.

Our Deeper View

Cybersecurity has long been a cat-and-mouse chase: as technology advances, so do the attacks and risks. The rise of generative AI has only exacerbated that cycle, enabling bad actors of all experience levels to create realistic phishing content and elaborate system attacks more easily than ever. As a result, using more sophisticated AI tools to better protect against AI attacks is becoming increasingly important and less optional. Luckily for organizations, this doesn’t require having to build your own LLMs, agents, or AI defenses. Rather, at this point, there are many enterprise SaaS offerings that are easy to deploy and target specific business needs.