As companies rush to adopt AI across their operations, attackers are exploiting the same technology against them.
From automated hacking to AI‑powered scams, the new threats are forcing companies to rethink their broader approach to security. Beyond hardening technical defenses, companies operating in the AI age need to examine a wide range of practices, say industry experts, updating the way software patches are deployed and rebuilding the human layer of security.
“Everybody needs to be on a war footing right now,” Mayank Upadhyay, chief security and trust officer at Snowflake, told Fortune. The attack surface across a typical enterprise—network, laptops, cloud infrastructure, logins—is now generating so much data that human teams can’t hope to triage without help from AI, he said.
For years, most organizations managed cyber risk on a predictable schedule. Security teams would discover flaws in their software, vendors would bundle fixes into periodic updates, and companies would decide when to install those patches—often weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. That slower, batch‑style approach existed, in part, because updating critical systems can mean taking them offline, and there is always a risk that a new patch breaks something important.
