Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Rise of Purpose-driven AI Innovation Across Cyber and Tech
By Leonid Belkind, Co-Founder and CTO,
Torq
2023 was the year of AI - ChatGPT has made a
big splash not just in the tech industry, but in all industries, creating a
new, accelerated wave of generative AI innovation and implementation. 2023 also
saw a rise in cyberattacks, fueled by expanding attack surfaces and the
weaponization of AI to make cyberattacks more sophisticated. At the same time,
more organizations are turning to AI technology to better detect and protect
against these attacks.
The technology and cybersecurity landscape
will continue to evolve in 2024, and organizations need to be prepared for the
transformations in the horizon. Here are my top three predictions for trends
we'll see next year in these industries:
As the
"Generative AI Era" enters its second year we will start seeing more purpose
and order in AI usage in enterprises.
As the "wow" effect regarding what can be done
with Generative AI remains prominent for a second year in a row, being fed by
consequent innovations delivered by the likes of OpenAI and Google,
organizations everywhere will start figuring out how to harness AI capabilities
for their purposes, rather than just being astonished by the "art of the
possible."
The first generation of AI capabilities in various enterprise products, focused
on low-hanging, non-complex scenarios, such as all kinds of co-pilots, will no
longer easily astonish and dazzle every person seeing them for the first time.
The result will be a requirement that AI-powered capabilities focus on use
value and being harnessed to solve real issues.
With
workers warming up to generative AI, the next wave of innovation in the future
of work will be automation.
Simplifying and streamlining work is nothing
new since the dawn of technology - we've been creating and adopting tools to
help us automate our work for decades. But in 2024, we will see automation
really kick into high gear and help support individuals and companies to
achieve their goals faster, easier, and more efficiently. In the cyber
industry, for example, security teams will lean even more on automation for
rapid security triage and enable them to significantly close the gap in time
between cybersecurity incidents and successful incident responses.
In
2024, organizations will ramp up their use of security automation or risk
falling behind, or worse, getting breached.
Slowing spending in 2024 will continue to
place further burdens on already strapped security teams from a hiring and
resourcing perspective. With a widening skills gap, we will see automation
tools that can handle traditional SecOps tasks to fill the gaps left by the
empty seats of the security operations center (SOC). These tools will be
especially key for organizations to manage cyber threats as they continue to
rapidly grow and evolve, aided by AI.
On the other end of the scale, we could see
some organizations keep clinging to previous paradigms, investing automation
only in some "pockets" of their security operations, rather than in
organization-wide programs and capabilities. These organizations will start
seeing their security posture plummet and will experience higher costs and,
inevitably, more breaches.
In summary, generative AI - already a
game-changer in the cybersecurity and tech sectors - will continue to be a
"beacon" of transformation as the technology and use cases mature, allowing
organizations to better understand how they can leverage AI capabilities. In
particular, its use in the workplace will increase as workers and employers
realize the benefits of automation for streamlining workflows and empowering
greater innovation. For security, automation will become a "must-have" tool to
fill in the cyber skills gap - a problem that has long plagued security teams -
and will be used to combat more sophisticated security threats in 2024.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leonid Belkind is Co-founder and CTO at Torq. He has an extensive background in cybersecurity, with over 20 years of experience in software development, product management, project management and organizational building. Prior to Torq, Leonid was the Head of Mobile Information Protection at Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. where he was responsible for multiple product lines and launched two threat prevention products. In addition, Leonid was the Co-Founder and CTO of Luminate Security, where he led his team to transform the way in which companies allow access to corporate services and applications. Most recently, Leonid was named Chief Technology Officer of the Year by Cybersecurity Excellence Awards 2023, and has been featured in VentureBeat, SiliconANGLE and CSO to discuss the role of AI in the cybersecurity industry.