The digital landscape has become a central arena for state competition, with businesses becoming targets of critical infrastructure.
Corporate risk has fundamentally changed, tying boardroom discussions to a formidable triad: geopolitics, AI, and cybersecurity. The digital landscape has matured into a primary arena for state competition, with commercial enterprises serving as critical infrastructure targets. Cybersecurity threats are no longer simple criminal acts; they are instruments of statecraft and economic espionage. The World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 reports that nearly 60% of surveyed organisations are overhauling their strategy due to geopolitical tensions, with a third of CEOs citing cyber espionage as their pre-eminent geopolitical concern.
Generative AI is dramatically accelerating this risk, shifting the power balance toward attackers. AI is a dual-use technology, on the attack side, AI enables threat actors to operate with unprecedented scale. Our own PANW Unit 42 research also shows the mean time to exfiltrate (MTTE) plummeted from nine days in 2021 to just two days in 2023. This convergence has translated into massive financial risk with projections of $9.5 trillion USD globally in 2024. This exposure is primarily due to the fragmented cyber estate, with an enterprise using on average about 30 tools to protect their digital assets.
AI is acting as a powerful turbocharger for malicious actors, dramatically reducing the average time to a successful breach from 44 days to less than 5 hours. Traditional security methods are failing against AI’s dynamic, data-centric nature because they rely on static rules. Securing AI requires an adaptive, continuous, and AI-native security posture. The fundamental shift is platformisation.
Security must become real-time and automated (enabled by AI) to counter attackers. A flexible platform delivers autonomous, real-time resilience, providing unified visibility, native integration, AI-driven automation, and cost effectiveness. This approach has provided tangible results, with PANW data showing that organisations can achieve a Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) of 7 minutes and a Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) of 1 minute for high-priority incidents in their own operations.
The challenge for business leaders today is clear: you must become fluent in the interplay of geopolitics, AI, and cyber risk. Only by shifting the mindset from a perimeter defence to a platform-first cybersecurity strategy can organisations secure their future, ensuring competitiveness and strategic direction in this new era of convergence.