By Palo Alto Network’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel and BSA | The Software Alliance Board Member Bruce Byrd
Artificial intelligence has quickly become the disruptive technology of our time. As AI adoption continues to skyrocket, policy conversations are rightfully gravitating toward developing strategies for managing AI’s potential risks most effectively while harnessing its significant benefits.
A reality of today’s threat landscape is that cybercriminals are growing more sophisticated and leveraging AI to further amplify the scale and speed of their attacks. As AI becomes more widely adopted across industries, it will also exponentially expand the digital attack surface and give criminals new vectors — like training data and models — to target.
This sobering backdrop underscores the need to aggressively leverage AI for cyber defense. At Palo Alto Networks, we have doubled down on this posture because we firmly believe that AI-powered cybersecurity is vital to protecting privacy, enhancing national security, and safeguarding our digital way of life.
Consider this: Each day, AI enables Palo Alto Networks to detect an average of 2.3 million unique attacks that were not present the day before. This process of continuous discovery and analysis allows threat detection to stay ahead of the adversary, blocking an average of 11.3 billion total attacks each day.
Historically, our most precious cyber resources – people – have been inundated with security data to triage manually while critical alerts are missed and vulnerabilities remain exposed. Fortunately, AI-powered Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are reversing the legacy “Whac-A-Mole” posture and giving defenders the upper hand. We are seeing transformative results from AI-powered SOCs, such as reducing average incident response times from two to three days down to under two hours and driving a five-times increase in incident close-out rates.
As the use of AI tools accelerates across organizations, we must simultaneously work to keep this AI infrastructure secure. This is possible with Palo Alto Network’s “Secure AI by Design,” which enables organizations of all shapes and sizes the ability to discover, classify, and govern AI-powered applications, providing visibility into the entire AI ecosystem.
AI is here to stay. By embracing innovation, fostering collaboration, and adopting a risk-centric approach to governance, we can reap the tremendous benefits of AI to build a safer and more secure digital future for all.
About the author:
Bruce Byrd is Executive Vice President and General Counsel at Palo Alto Networks and a BSA Board Member. He is responsible for legal affairs, policy and government affairs, corporate governance, compliance, and risk resilience globally.
