AI-Powered Cybersecurity Strategies

Securing the Future: AI-powered cybersecurity strategies

9th May 2025 • 0 minute read

Conversations from the Hg Digital Summit

This year's Hg Digital Summit brought together tech leaders at the crucial moment when AI evolved from a potential to an essential business driver. Featuring keynote speaker Russell Kaplan, Founding President of Cognition AI, the event focused on practical implementation strategies rather than theoretical concepts.

Among many others, two topics were hotly discussed: the influence of AI on cybersecurity and on software engineering. Hg sat down with some of the figures at the coal face of these subjects to give you a glimpse of the future. In the first of these, we focus on cyber and how to take action in a rapidly evolving threat landscape, balancing innovation with security and AI as fuel in an ever-changing cyber arms race.

The AI Security Paradox: enabling innovation while managing risk

"We believe that there's a role AI can play in every phase of the attack chain and adversaries are playing in those spaces to try to figure out where to get the most value from generative AI..."

As AI democratizes hacking with sophisticated phishing attacks reclaiming the top spot for breaches, cybersecurity experts Mike Spisak of Palo Alto, and Espen Agnalt Johansen of Visma reveal why organizations must embrace rather than block AI innovation. Their radical vision replaces slow "council of elders" security models with embedded, technically-savvy decision-makers who can enable responsible experimentation at speed.

“If you’re reachable, you’re breachable”: zero trust in the AI era of cyber defence

"We believe in the KISS principle. I mean, keep it simple and stupid. And that is really important because, as I said, cybersecurity is a human problem."

AI has democratized hacking to make lone attackers as powerful as nation-states, while legacy security tools like VPNs have become fundamental vulnerabilities rather than protections. Zscaler's security leaders, Sanjit Ganguli and Akshay Grover, deliver the stark warning that "if you're reachable, you're breachable" while revealing how Zero Trust architecture can dramatically reduce your attack surface in this AI-powered threat landscape.