Look for increasing instances of shadow AI in the workplace, when well-meaning employees use consumer-grade AI tools instead of more secure enterprise-grade counterparts.

We expect generative AI and foundation models to play a rapidly-growing role for threat actors and defenders alike. Threat actors will likely use AI to increase the scale of their information operations, and we expect to see “phishing, SMS, and other social engineering operations” that will appear more legitimate, we wrote in the report. AI will likely help them craft phishing attacks that contain fewer misspellings, grammar errors, and obviously- cultural context.

Yet as attackers get more persistent and innovative, cyber defenders will be able to tap into improved tools to stop them. Defenders will use gen AI and related technologies to strengthen detection, response, and attribution of adversaries at scale, as well as speed up analysis and other time-consuming tasks such as reverse engineering. In the long-term, we expect organizations using AI to boost security will see outsized benefits to reduce toil, address threat overload, and close the widening talent gap.