AI is changing cybersecurity teams — but not necessarily by replacing the people who work on them. New research from IANS finds that CISOs are largely looking to AI to help their existing teams do more, while rethinking how work gets divided between junior and senior security professionals. The research suggests most CISOs aren't planning to shrink their teams because of AI; instead, they're looking to automate routine tasks, reskill employees, and give experienced security professionals more time to focus on complex problems.
As organizations race to adopt AI, security leaders are also facing new questions about budgets, staffing, and the skills their teams will need in the years ahead. AI is becoming an increasingly important factor in how CISOs make the case for security spending. As businesses prioritize AI initiatives, security leaders are finding opportunities to use that momentum to secure funding for new tools, staffing, and other areas of their programs. At the same time, rising costs from vendors adding AI capabilities to their products are putting added pressure on already tight security budgets. Dark Reading associate editor Kristina Beek spoke with Nick Kakolowski, senior director for CISO research at IANS, about how AI is reshaping security organizations and what CISOs are doing to keep pace.
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Kristina Beek & Nick Kakolowski: Full Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length by Informa TechTarget's internal AI assistant. For the full experience, please watch the video.
Dark Reading's Kristina Beek: Hi everyone, my name is Kristina Beek, and I'm an editor at Dark Reading. Today we are here to talk about some research that you were a part of, Nick. I would love it if you could introduce yourself, and then we'll get started on some of this research.
Nick Kakolowski: Thanks so much for having me, Kristina. It's great to be here. I'm Nick Kakolowski, senior director for CISO research at IANS. Artico Search and IANS work together on a CISO compensation and budget survey every year. And we've recently done a lot of research around how AI is shaping teams, and also in general, work around AI maturity and capabilities across the infosec sector.
DR's Kristina Beek: Awesome. What can you tell us about some of the findings this year that were really notable or stood out to you?
Nick Kakolowski: We have found that the industry is still very all over the place in terms of use of AI, maturity around AI. But what is fairly unified is that business executives are moving way more aggressively than they have, compared to any other technology that we have seen over the years. And the result has been the CISO community moving fast to get past this idea that this is dangerous, we need to pump the brakes, and get into this mindset of the business is going here, we have to figure out how to secure it as we go. And as a result, we are seeing early signs of fairly significant changes in terms of how orgs are thinking about staffing, how they're thinking about organizing teams, how they're thinking about what maturity really looks like.
DR's Kristina Beek: What would you say has changed in the past couple of years to make AI such a dominant budget priority? I'm sure people have slightly different opinions on pinpointing what it is.