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How AI can give defenders a competitive advantage
WEF report reveals AI adoption in cybersecurity is moving from pilots to real-world deployment, with gains in vulnerability identification and threat detection.
At a glance
Who: World Economic Forum (WEF); KPMG.
What: WEF and KPMG have published the AI and Cyber: Empowering Defenders report, which shows how AI is rapidly reshaping cybersecurity and is the biggest driver of change in the field.
Why: As enterprise attack surfaces expand to include hundreds of thousands of internet-facing assets, the scale and complexity of cyber risk are increasing significantly.
Where: The report draws on 20 real-world case studies and insights from one-on-one interviews and workshops conducted under the World Economic Forum’s Cyber Frontiers: AI & Cyber initiative, convening 105 representatives from 84 organisations across 15 industries.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to give the defenders a competitive advantage, according to a new World Economic Forum report. It is rapidly reshaping cybersecurity and is the biggest driver of change in the field, says WEF.
Some 94 per cent of cyber leaders identify AI as a defining force and 77 per cent of organisations already use it in their cyber operations.
Deploying AI strategically
The AI and Cyber: Empowering Defenders report, developed in collaboration with KPMG, highlights measurable gains in cost reduction, response speed and resilience. While threat actors increasingly weaponise AI to automate deception, generate malware and scale attacks at machine speed, the report indicates that organisations deploying AI strategically are achieving significant advantages.
Organisations that extensively leverage AI in security reduce average breach costs by up to $1.9m and shorten breach lifecycles by approximately 80 days, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report.
“AI has the potential to shift the balance towards defenders,” said Akshay Joshi, head of the Centre for Cybersecurity, World Economic Forum. “Organisations that treat it as a strategic capability, rather than a standalone tool, will be better placed to turn growing cyber risk into resilience and competitive advantage.”
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Building on the Forum’s 2025 publication, Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity: Balancing Risks and Rewards, the 2026 edition focuses on how organisations are deploying AI for defence in practice. As enterprise attack surfaces expand to include hundreds of thousands of internet-facing assets, the scale and complexity of cyber risk are increasing significantly.
Among the examples featured, KPMG reports a 25 per cent increase in operational efficiency in threat intelligence, Accenture cut security analysis time in more than 100,000 internet-facing sites from 15 minutes to under one minute, and IBM’s Atom platform helps scale global 24x7 threat detection and response, automating more than 850 analyst hours a month and cutting end-to-end investigation time by 37 per cent.
“Attackers are moving faster and at greater scale than ever before. This report is a call to action for organisations to match that pace, with AI as a force multiplier for cyber defence,” said Laurent Gobbi, partner, global head of Cyber & Tech Risk, KPMG.
The report emphasises that AI’s value in cybersecurity lies in augmenting human expertise, accelerating decisions and strengthening resilience, rather than automation alone. The report highlights that its impact depends on clear AI deployment strategy, rigorously tested use cases before scaling, and strong governance and human oversight from the outset.
“Organisations that treat it as a strategic capability, rather than a standalone tool, will be better placed to turn growing cyber risk into resilience and competitive advantage”
The report draws on 20 real-world case studies and insights from one-on-one interviews and workshops conducted under the World Economic Forum’s Cyber Frontiers: AI & Cyber initiative, convening 105 representatives from 84 organisations across 15 industries.
As cyber risks become more complex, the report calls on government and business leaders to treat AI as a foundational security capability, investing not only in technology but also in the skills, processes and governance required to defend at machine speed.
The Cyber Frontiers: AI & Cyber initiative, launched in 2024, brings together a global multi-stakeholder community to explore how AI is reshaping cybersecurity through a knowledge-sharing platform. The initiative equips organisations with insights to harness AI technologies to strengthen their cybersecurity capabilities along with guidance for building strong guardrails. The initiative aims to develop approaches to enable secure and scalable adoption of agentic AI to ensure a secure agentic economy.
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