AI is accelerating the cyber threat landscape

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly shifted the balance of power in cybersecurity. Themes from recent research highlight that organisations are now facing attacks that move faster, adapt quicker and scale more aggressively than human teams can manage alone. Industry research and what we see across clients reflect the scale of this shift: many organisations now feel they cannot keep pace with the velocity and sophistication of emerging threats. This isn’t a marginal increase in pressure it’s a fundamental mismatch between attacker capability and organisational resilience.

Figures suggest that more than 90% of organisations are turning to AI defensively, integrating intelligent tools to support detection, analysis and response. But attackers are doing the same. Generative AI has made phishing emails far harder to distinguish from authentic communications and deepfake-driven impersonation is emerging as a credible and growing threat. AI-driven ransomware chains are compressing the defender’s response window drastically and traditional detection methods are losing traction in the face of automated, adaptive attacks.

The real-world impact is significant. Ransomware incidents are common; recovery is far from guaranteed and repeated attacks are no longer unusual. Financial, operational and reputational consequences continue to escalate, especially for organisations where resilience foundations are already stretched.

Across sectors, one theme is becoming clear, the threat landscape is evolving faster than many organisations can adjust. This is no longer just a technical challenge it’s a leadership and organisational resilience challenge. Many businesses still face misalignment between security teams and leadership around readiness, risk appetite and crisis expectations. AI-enabled threats expose these gaps quickly, testing governance, communication and decision-making under pressure.

What does this mean for businesses?

Culture is emerging as a decisive resilience asset. In the most resilient organisations we work with, roles are well understood, escalation pathways are clear, and crisis communication is practiced and coordinated. Leadership provides direction rather than noise, creating the confidence teams need to act quickly and effectively.

AI heightens the importance of this alignment. Strong leadership now shapes resilience by setting risk appetite, challenging assumptions and engaging directly in realistic simulations. Cyber is becoming a core strategic concern, not just an assurance activity.

How are organisations using AI?

Ultimately, leadership owns the risk. Boards define expectations, ensure meaningful reporting and create the environment where human judgement can focus on what matters, while AI supports detection, triage and automated containment.

AI is now deeply integrated across multiple layers of the security ecosystem rather than acting as a standalone capability:

• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR/XDR): machine learning models analyse behaviour and trigger automated containment in real time.
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): AI learns what ‘normal’ looks like and flags anomalies across logs, networks and cloud environments.
• Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR): AI triages alerts, enriches incidents and executes playbooks for common scenarios.
• Threat intelligence and hunting: generative AI accelerates investigations, enabling analysts to query in natural language and correlate indicators rapidly.
• Email, identity and cloud security: AI detects behavioural anomalies, such as irregular login patterns or privilege misuse, before they escalate.

When culture is fragmented, even the most advanced tools can struggle to compensate for attacks like these. Misalignment between teams, uncertainty about authority or hesitation in escalating concerns can turn a manageable incident into a material crisis. But when culture is strong, when roles, escalation paths and crisis communications are clear and practised, the organisation can respond with confidence and coordination, even under intense pressure. Trust, clarity and psychological safety become as important as any technical control.

AI has changed the threat landscape, but it has also highlighted the fact that resilience is built on people; how they communicate, how they make decisions and how they lead under pressure.

Culture, more than any single tool, determines whether an organisation can withstand and recover from AI-enabled attacks.

How we help organisations respond to AI-enabled cyber risk

AI has tilted the landscape, but organisations are far from powerless. With aligned leadership, AI-augmented defence, continuous testing and a deep understanding of digital dependencies, the resilience gap can be closed.

This is where we work with clients every day, with a calm, grounded perspective. We help leadership teams define risk appetite and understand where they are genuinely exposed. We support chief information security officers (CISOs) and security teams who are overwhelmed by complexity, tool sprawl and expectation. We run the testing and simulations that surface the weaknesses attackers would otherwise exploit. And when incidents do happen, we stand alongside clients, stabilising, containing and helping them rebuild resilience with confidence.

To discuss how we can help your organisation prepare for AI-enabled cyber threats, please get in touch with Sheila Pancholi or your usual RSM contact.

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