I’m reporting from Davos, Switzerland, where thousands of business leaders and politicians have arrived at the World Economic Forum to shake hands, talk shop, and maybe even eke out a few ski runs.
Some executives I’ve spoken to this week had some big concerns about AI, but none of them had anything to do with a potential bubble.
Raj Sharma, EY’s global managing partner of growth and innovation, said there’s not enough talk about AI security — specifically, the management of AI agents and their lifecycle.
“It has access to your data. It has no name, so there is no identity or anything associated with that,” Sharma said.
Compare that to humans, where every computer system and piece of data they touch is often tracked.
“We have to build industrial-level security for AI agents in that particular area. To me, that’s still a gap that somebody needs to work on,” Sharma said. “Everybody’s talking a good game. But if you look under the covers, it’s still not mature.”
“That keeps me up at night,” Sharma added.
He’s not alone. Tim Walsh, the CEO of KPMG US, told me the biggest issue he talks to CEOs about regularly is cyber risk, specifically related to AI.
AI agents are the latest twist in executives’ ongoing concerns over cybersecurity, and it’s proving to be an incredibly challenging problem. Somewhat ironically, the only way to fight the threat is with … more AI.
In some cases, the risk has gotten so big that it’s shifting timelines on companies’ AI plans.
“It’s not that they’re not moving forward, but they are taking a moment to make sure that their environment is secure, and perhaps even leaving data on-prem a little bit longer so they’re confident that got their data security in place,” Walsh told me.
Walsh said another “real concern” is the threat of quantum computing from a security perspective.
While he acknowledged we’re still a few years out from the tech being fully developed, its power is incredible.
“Quantum breaks everything,” Walsh said. “I mean, all encryption.”
That’s led companies to look at their systems and reencrypting things, no easy task.
“We’re spending quite a bit of time as well, helping companies think through: What does that look like? How do you structure it? How long will it take?” Walsh said.
