Artificial intelligence is helping businesses move faster, but unfortunately, it is doing the same thing for cybercriminals. AI can help employees research, write, analyze data, automate repetitive work, and communicate more efficiently. Those same capabilities can also help attackers create convincing phishing messages, impersonate executives, develop malicious code, identify vulnerabilities, and launch attacks at a speed and scale that would have required considerably more resources just a few years ago.

The threat is already becoming measurable. One in four malicious breaches are now AI-enabled, an increase of 56 percent from the previous year, and those breaches cost companies an average of approximately $6 million. For businesses, AI adoption therefore cannot be separated from cybersecurity anymore. The question is no longer simply how your company can use AI, but whether your security strategy is evolving as quickly as AI is.

AI Is Making Old Scams Much Better

Many AI-related cyber threats are not completely new forms of attack. Instead, AI is making familiar attacks faster, cheaper, more convincing, and easier to execute at scale.

Phishing is one example. Employees have been warned for years to look for suspicious messages containing awkward wording, obvious spelling mistakes, strange formatting, or unusual requests. Generative AI makes those clues much less reliable because attackers can create polished emails in seconds, adapt their writing to different industries, personalize messages using publicly available information, and produce enormous numbers of variations.

AI can also help criminals move beyond text. Deepfake audio and video make it increasingly possible to imitate executives, coworkers, customers, and other trusted individuals. An employee could receive what appears to be a video message from a CEO, a voice call from a manager, or an urgent request from someone they recognize, even though that person never made the request.

This is already becoming part of the cybersecurity landscape, with deepfake impersonation appearing in AI-enabled breaches. Businesses therefore need to rethink one of the foundations of digital security: seeing or hearing someone is no longer always sufficient verification.

AI Is Speeding Up the Attack

Cybercriminals do not necessarily need AI to invent completely new attacks for it to create a serious problem. Speed alone changes the equation.

Attackers are already integrating AI throughout cybercrime workflows, from creating phishing pages and harvesting credentials to producing social-engineering content and developing malicious tools. In one documented example, an AI-assisted malicious web shell was deployed in approximately 60 seconds.

Tasks that previously required specialized expertise and considerable time can increasingly be accelerated or partially automated. For businesses, that can reduce the amount of time available to identify and respond to a threat.

Security has traditionally been a contest between attackers trying to get inside and defenders trying to recognize what they are doing. AI is making that contest faster, which means businesses cannot assume cybersecurity processes developed for yesterday’s threats will automatically keep pace with tomorrow’s.

Your Employees Could Be Creating AI Risk Without Realizing It

The threat does not only come from attackers. Some of the biggest AI-related security risks can begin with completely normal employee behavior.

Imagine an employee asks an AI tool to summarize a confidential client document. A salesperson uploads customer information so AI can identify the strongest prospects. A marketer pastes unreleased campaign information into a chatbot for help writing copy. Another employee connects an AI application to company files because it makes searching them easier.

None of these employees are intentionally creating a security problem. They are trying to work more efficiently, but the information being shared may include customer data, intellectual property, financial information, personally identifiable information, or other material the business would never intentionally make public.

Organizations are already using an average of 10 AI applications each month, while between 87 and 93 percent experienced at least one high-risk generative AI interaction every month. The share of prompts containing sensitive corporate, personal, or regulated information also doubled during the research period, from approximately 2 percent to 4 percent.

Four percent may not immediately sound alarming, but across hundreds or thousands of employee AI interactions, it becomes significant. At that rate, roughly one in every 25 interactions could potentially involve sensitive information.

Welcome to the Shadow AI Problem

Businesses have dealt with “shadow IT” for years: employees using technology that has not been formally approved by the company. Now they have another challenge to manage: shadow AI.

An employee discovers an AI tool that helps them complete a task faster. They create an account, upload some information, and begin incorporating the platform into their daily workflow. From the employee’s perspective, they have discovered a productivity hack. From the company’s perspective, business information may now be entering a system nobody in IT, security, legal, or leadership has reviewed.

The growing use of personal AI accounts for workplace activities makes this particularly important. A business could carefully secure its approved technology environment while employees unintentionally create entirely new paths for sensitive information to leave it.

Trying to prevent employees from using AI entirely is unlikely to be a sustainable answer. Businesses instead need to make approved AI tools accessible, establish clear expectations, and give employees practical guidance about what can and cannot be shared.

Every Business Needs an AI Acceptable-Use Policy

Many organizations already have policies governing passwords, email, company devices, customer information, and remote access. AI should be treated with the same seriousness, particularly as these tools become embedded in everyday workflows.

Employees need to know which AI platforms are approved, which types of information can be entered into them, and which information should never leave controlled company systems. Businesses should also establish rules around whether employees can upload company documents, connect AI applications to internal systems, use AI with customer information, or allow AI-generated work to reach customers without human review.

The policy does not need to make AI difficult to use. In fact, an overly restrictive policy may encourage employees to find workarounds and create even more shadow AI. The better goal is to make responsible AI use easier than risky AI use by giving employees approved tools, straightforward rules, and a clear place to go when they are unsure.

Businesses Need New Verification Habits

AI also means companies should reconsider how employees verify unusual requests. If a message asks someone to change payment information, transfer money, disclose credentials, share confidential documents, or perform another sensitive action, confirmation should not rely solely on the message itself.

A second verification channel can make a significant difference. If the CEO sends an unusual request by email, an employee can confirm it through a known phone number or internal communication channel. If a vendor suddenly changes banking information, the company can verify the change through an established contact rather than replying directly to the incoming request.

These procedures become even more important as synthetic audio and video improve. The goal is not to train every employee to become a deepfake expert. It is to create business processes that remain secure even when a fake is convincing.

AI Can Defend Your Business, Too

There is another side to this story. AI is not only improving cyberattacks; it is also giving businesses and security teams new ways to identify and respond to them.

Organizations are already using AI for threat and anomaly detection, threat intelligence analysis, and phishing and fraud detection. These applications can help security teams process enormous amounts of activity, identify unusual patterns, prioritize threats, and respond more quickly than purely manual processes.

The potential financial impact is substantial as well. Businesses using AI and automation extensively within security operations experienced breach costs nearly $2 million lower on average than organizations that were not.

AI is therefore creating an unusual new reality for businesses: it is simultaneously part of the threat and part of the defense. Avoiding AI altogether is not necessarily the safest strategy. Businesses need to understand where AI introduces new vulnerabilities while also identifying where it can strengthen their ability to detect and respond to threats.

Cybersecurity Is Becoming Everyone’s Responsibility

AI-related security cannot belong exclusively to the IT department because AI no longer belongs exclusively to the IT department. Marketing teams use it to create and analyze content, sales teams use it to research prospects, customer service teams use it to answer questions, and executives use it to summarize information and accelerate decision-making.

That makes AI security partly a technology problem, but also a training and culture problem. Employees need to understand that information entered into an AI platform is still company information. They need to recognize that a perfectly written email can still be phishing, that a familiar voice can potentially be synthetic, and that an impressive AI output can still contain inaccurate or unsafe information.

Most importantly, employees need simple procedures for what to do when something feels unusual. The companies best prepared for AI-related cyber threats will not necessarily be those with the biggest cybersecurity budgets. They will be the companies whose people understand that the rules of digital trust are changing and know how to respond when those rules are tested.

Use AI Faster. Just Make Sure You Use It Smarter.

Businesses should absolutely be exploring AI because the productivity and competitive opportunities are too significant to ignore. But speed without strategy can create risks that companies do not discover until sensitive information has already been exposed or an employee has acted on a convincing AI-generated scam.

Before introducing another AI platform into your organization, understand what information it can access and establish rules around what employees can share. Review who can connect AI systems to company data, train employees to recognize AI-powered scams, create verification procedures for sensitive requests, and make sure somebody is responsible for monitoring how AI is actually being used across the business.

AI is making businesses faster, and it is making cybercriminals faster at the same time. The advantage will belong to organizations that understand both sides of that equation and build their AI strategies accordingly.

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