Indian enterprises and critical infrastructure operators must invest in strengthening artificial intelligence (AI) governance as autonomous agents significantly expand the cyber threat landscape, industry leaders said.
"Agents deployed for cybersecurity can handle many lower-level tasks such as triage, but organisations need to understand where these agents are being deployed, what they are doing, and establish guardrails to ensure they achieve the intended outcomes," said Nick Schneider, CEO of Arctic Wolf, he said, adding that the biggest challenge for enterprises is balancing innovation with security. "Organisations deploy too quickly, haven't put any guardrails up and AI starts operating in a way that it shouldn't," he said, speaking at a panel moderated by ET's Himanshi Lohchab.
Puneet Chandok, president, Microsoft India and South Asia, said the industry's reliance on "human in the loop" is being misunderstood. "It was never supposed to be humans on every keystroke," he said. "We don't need a fast human, we need proper boundary conditions."
Cybersecurity budgets must also evolve alongside AI investments, according to Chandok. "Security is still being viewed as a percentage of the IT budget. AI ambition is growing three times faster while security spending remains flat," he said. "Security has to become a percentage of your AI ambition and it has to be built by design, not bolted on afterwards."
