Cybersecurity Professionals Who Ignore AI Are Arming Their Enemies
TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
Security teams running manual processes cannot match AI-equipped attackers, making AI fluency a core skill.
Flashpass CEO Emil Barr warns that criminals are already operating AI at scale, with AI-enabled adversary attacks rising 89% in 2025 and lateral movement time dropping to 29 minutes.
More than 82% of phishing emails now use AI in some form, and 92% of polymorphic attacks rely on it for scale.
With a global workforce gap of roughly 4.8 million positions, AI is the only realistic way to process threat intelligence at the required volume, with alert triage the highest-value application.
Barr cautions that AI hallucinates, so verification must be built into workflows, and that prompt engineering and output validation are trainable skills CISOs should develop. He advises auditing existing sanctioned and unsanctioned AI usage before building new capability.