Generative AI is important for cybersecurity, as attackers invest in the technology

At the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live Conference in mid-October, OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla told global tech editor Jason Dean that AI will do 80% of people’s jobs in the next decade, leading to a “great abundance” of wealth that could be managed to the benefit of all people.

“There’s more than enough abundance to share,” Khosla said. “There’s room for universal basic income, assuring minimum standards, and people will be able to work on the things they want to work on.”

Generative AI promises to fully transform how we work, according to bullish venture capitalists—but those in the cybersecurity trenches are taking a more measured approach to the practicalities of AI deployment.

On the security side. BlackBerry CTO Charles Eagan told IT Brew at the BlackBerry Summit on October 17 that his team is looking at working with other companies to implement cybersecurity solutions using AI, but that they’re also taking a cautious approach.

“We’ve done some active prototyping and evaluation—there’s a lot of generative AI solutions out there,” Eagan said. “We’re looking at Amazon Bedrock, we’re looking at OpenAI.”

No matter what the future holds for AI in BlackBerry, for now the technology can’t be trusted to operate without oversight, Eagan said. And he’s convinced of the need for the technology to have guardrails and regulations.

“I would make a generalization here: Every single use case that I’ve seen that we would use for generative AI would be something that goes to a human for review,” Eagan told us. “The potential for misinformation is high.”

Threat detected. For Michael Covington, VP of portfolio strategy at Apple client software developer Jamf, the rise in AI usage means that any tech company ignoring it is doing so at its own risk. Covington argued that rather than see AI as a danger that expands the threat surface, it’s better to look at it as something that can be deployed by defenders as well.

“To ignore the technologies that are there puts us and our customers and Apple’s customers at a big disadvantage,” Covington said. “Because the attackers are using those technologies.”

Sumit Johar, CIO of AI development company Automation Anywhere, added that as threat actors become more comfortable with AI, so should defenders.

“All the more reason for us to invest more in generative AI; otherwise, we’ll be caught unprepared,” Johar said. “Because the bad actors are not going to wait—they’re going to start right now.”