20 Ways GenAI Will Support Stronger Cybersecurity

Forbes

10-07-2025

Already supporting a variety of business functions ranging from content creation to customer support, generative AI tools are poised to transform how organizations detect and defend against cyberthreats. By processing vast datasets, simulating attack scenarios and automating detection and response, GenAI can help security teams identify threats faster and address vulnerabilities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
From real-time threat detection to advanced security automation, GenAI could become an invaluable tool in defending against today's rapidly evolving cyberthreats. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council highlight specific ways GenAI is expected to shape the future of cyber defense, offering insights into both the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
1. Enabling Intelligent, Autonomous Agents
GenAI will reshape cyber defense by enabling intelligent, autonomous agents that detect and respond to threats in real time. These agents can adapt to evolving attack patterns, making security proactive rather than reactive—ushering in a new era of autonomous, identity-aware cyber resilience. - Mark McClain, SailPoint Technologies, Inc.
2. Streamlining Incident Management
By spotting risks sooner, automating responses and predicting assaults before they start, GenAI changes cybersecurity. It streamlines incident handling—turning hours into minutes for defense—reduces analyst workload, enhances training and simplifies defense. It's a real power amplifier. - Eric Almond, Gearco - True Extended Stay
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
3. Providing Enhanced, Adaptive Cyber Resilience
GenAI will enhance organizations' cyber resilience strategies. GenAI improves cyber defense by rapidly detecting threats through advanced analytics and automating response and recovery, reducing downtime and risk. It also adapts in real time to new threats, enhancing resilience and enabling organizations to better protect sensitive data and mitigate attacks. - Justin Giardina, 11:11 SYSTEMS
4. Accelerating Security Training And Awareness
Generative AI is exceptionally good at accelerating the training of security professionals and enhancing cyberthreat awareness. The bigger shift comes with agentic AI—autonomous systems that detect, anticipate and respond to threats in real time. It's a force multiplier, revolutionizing cyber defense and helping organizations stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated adversaries. - Hatem Naguib, Barracuda Networks
5. Establishing Dynamic Baselines For Threat Behavior
Traditional cybersecurity tools often rely on known threat signatures or static rules, making them less effective. GenAI will shift cybersecurity paradigms from human-paced reactions to continuous, GenAI/agent-based operations by analyzing historical and real-time data and signals to establish new dynamic baselines for the behavior of threat actors and uncover anomalies that indicate new threats. - Shyam Ravindranathan, SAP
6. Providing Information, Summaries And Simulations
Generative AI is useful for tasks like querying tools, summarizing reports and simulating phishing attacks. For deeper threat detection and decision-making, however, other forms of AI—like behavioral models and autonomous agents—are better suited to help security teams respond faster and more effectively. - Marcus Fowler, Darktrace
7. Providing Personalized Security Training And Support
GenAI has the potential to reimagine security awareness training. It could enable real-time conversations between employees and an 'AI security analyst'—for example, when a user reports a suspicious email, the AI analyst can explain whether it's malicious or not. GenAI could also be used to create hyper-relevant phishing simulations based on each employee's role, behavior and risk profile. - Michael DeCesare, Abnormal AI
8. Simulating Threat Scenarios
GenAI will reshape cyber defense by empowering both attackers and defenders. Threat actors will generate diverse, adaptive attack scenarios at scale, while red and blue teams will use GenAI to simulate attacks, detections and responses. In 2025, adopting an AI-native security partner won't be optional; it will be essential for resilience. - Rajat Sharma, CWS
9. Supporting CISO Functions
The chief information security officer plays a key role in defending organizations against cyberattacks. GenAI is emerging as a key enabler of CISO functions—from strategy and compliance to threat monitoring and incident response. It also assists with policy definition and budgeting. The effectiveness of an AI-enabled co-CISO may soon rival or surpass that of a human CISO. - Alex Pinaev, Mobix
10. Providing Contextual Information On Trending Vulnerabilities
GenAI is great at providing additional context to information about vulnerabilities, such as whether they are being used to exploit organizations, whether code is available, or whether the vulnerability is being discussed on various cybercriminal forums. How will the vulnerability affect my compliance? GenAI can also provide trend analysis to help teams focus on areas of recurring exposure and developer training suggestions. - Eoin Keary, Edgescan
11. Scaling Real-Time Analysis Across Systems
GenAI will allow organizations to analyze exponentially more data across an infinite number of systems in near-real time, a task almost impossible without GenAI. This will unlock massive improvements in controls and automated response capabilities for defense across the industry. - Charlie Gautreaux, IRALOGIX
12. Strengthening Pen Testing
GenAI could research all existing and zero-day forms of attack to enable more thorough pen testing. Combined with fit-for-purpose agentic AI, it could not only detect attacks, but also either prevent them or immediately isolate them and aid in recovery. - Tsvi Gal, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
13. Powering Faster Detection And Response At Scale
While AI adoption is growing, most security teams are still manually approaching security—triaging alerts, chasing false positives and piecing together context across tools. GenAI will act as a force multiplier for defenders by powering faster detection, smarter decision-making and scaled response to match AI-enabled threats. - Grayson Milbourne, OpenText
14. Accelerating Detection, Analysis And Mitigation
GenAI will radically accelerate how fast defenders can respond—automating threat detection, analyzing logs and even writing mitigation playbooks in seconds, not hours. However, AI is only as good as the IT processes it's embedded in—without disciplined IT hygiene and change and configuration controls, you're just giving a faster tool to a messy system. - Scott Alldridge, IP Services
15. Detecting Leaked Credentials And Suggesting Remediation Steps
GenAI will help security engineers and developers by accurately detecting hardcoded or leaked credentials across code, logs and config files. It also auto-suggests remediation steps, reducing response time and easing manual effort. The MCP Servers Framework will enable LLMs to not only curate security evidence from multiple vendors, but also provide a holistic prevention story. - Siranjeevi Dheenadhayalan
16. Rapidly Correlating, Analyzing And Acting On Threat Data
Faster data analysis, correlation of information from different event sources, and the ability to consume large-scale external threat feeds will on their own have a significant impact. Once these improvements are paired with knowledge of an organization's vulnerabilities and an ability to act upon its infrastructure, GenAI will have the capacity to mitigate threats nearly immediately or with minimal human involvement. - Nolan Garrett, TorchLight
17. Predicting And Neutralizing Threats
GenAI will transform cyber defense by enabling intelligent, real-time threat detection and response. Instead of waiting for events to occur, AI agents will autonomously monitor, predict and neutralize threats so that cybersecurity is now a proactive and dynamic defense shielding an organization from known and unknown risks. - Mike Walker, Microsoft
18. Generating Dynamic Attack Scenarios
One transformative way GenAI will impact cybersecurity is through real-time threat simulation and adaptive defense strategies. Instead of relying solely on static rules or historical threat databases, GenAI can generate dynamic attack scenarios based on emerging patterns, allowing security teams to proactively test and reinforce system defenses before real threats materialize. - Pratik Badri, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
19. Shining A Light On Access Issues
GenAI will raise big questions around access and who can see what, when and how. Most threats aren't external breaches but accidental leaks due to improper permissions. AI heightens the risk of internal access issues and makes it even easier to surface sensitive data, so tightening permissions and understanding AI's reach will become essential. - Benjamin Niaulin, ShareGate by Workleap
20. Combating Voice Deepfakes
GenAI will intensify threats like voice deepfakes for phishing and impersonation, directly impacting voice-controlled systems and communications. Organizations will use GenAI to develop sophisticated real-time voice authentication and anomaly detection systems to defend against these advanced attacks and secure sensitive audio data. - Harshal Shah