Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In only a few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has changed almost every aspect of life, and especially so in business. Today, employees are using generative AI tools to draft emails, code software, and analyze data at lightning speed. However, there is a hidden side to this productivity boost: unauthorized AI use. Many employees are bypassing official IT channels and using shadow AI applications to get their work done.

As organizations race to adopt new AI tools, deploy AI agents, and build AI-powered software, they create new attack surfaces that traditional security controls were never designed to protect. A key example is the prompt and agentic interaction layer, which faces novel threats like indirect prompt injection and agentic tool chain attacks.

Cybersecurity has always been defined by moments of inflection. Periods of steady progress are followed by breakthroughs that fundamentally reshape how defenders operate and how technology enables them to succeed. Today we are entering one of those moments.

Every year at RSA Conference, I spend time with security leaders who are trying to solve the same fundamental challenge. They know what strong security operations should look like, but the path to building and sustaining that capability inside their own organization has become increasingly difficult. The market is shifting from buying tools to buying outcomes.

If an auditor walked in tomorrow and asked for a complete inventory of every AI model, agent, and tool in your environment, how long would it take you to produce it? For most organizations, the honest answer is: they can’t because the way AI is entering the enterprise has fundamentally changed.

Every major technological shift reshapes the landscape, creating both winners and losers. AI will be no different. The key question is which companies are positioned to capture the value it generates, and which ones may fall behind as it unfolds. If you look at previous technology shifts, the winners were not always the companies building the most visible products. They were often the ones that enabled the shift to happen in the first place, or those that benefited from the structural changes it created.

Boris Kurktchiev is a Field CTO at Teleport, known for his expertise in Zero-Trust identity solutions for cloud and AI, and for his contributions to the CNCF's Cloud Native AI working group. Doyensec dropped a piece last week called The MCP AuthN/Z Nightmare, and I think anyone deploying MCP in production needs to read it.