Your IT team assures you the firewalls are solid, your software is patched, and your systems are secure. But what about the employee in accounts who clicks every email link? Or the customer database sitting in a forgotten cloud account? Or the WhatsApp group where sensitive project details get shared?
Most business leaders focus on the technical defences while missing the bigger picture. True cyber resilience in the AI era requires more than just having the right technology. You need to understand that your greatest risks often hide in plain sight, woven into the daily fabric of how your business actually operates.
The uncomfortable truth is that you might not know your business as well as you think you do. With AI-powered threats seemingly becoming more sophisticated every day, those knowledge gaps could be exactly what cybercriminals are counting on.
The Blind Spots Most Leaders Miss
People: Your Greatest Asset… and Risk
Of the 2376 cyber security breaches reported to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in 2019, 90% could be attributed to mistakes made by end users. Human error remains the leading cause of data breaches, but it’s less about incompetence and more about evolution. AI-generated phishing emails are now so sophisticated they can fool experienced professionals who’ve been trained to spot suspicious messages. These attacks no longer just target your IT team; they’re studying your marketing director’s LinkedIn posts, your sales manager’s email signature, and even your CEO’s speaking schedule to craft perfectly tailored deceptions.
The real vulnerability lies in cross-departmental blind spots. Marketing teams sharing login credentials for social media accounts. Sales staff storing client lists on personal devices. Finance departments approving invoice payments without proper verification protocols. Each department operates with its own understanding of “acceptable risk,” often without considering how their practices affect overall cyber resilience.
Processes: The Invisible Gaps
Your documented procedures might look bulletproof on paper, but how does work actually get done when deadlines loom? Employees find workarounds: sharing passwords via Slack, storing files in personal cloud accounts, or bypassing cyber security protocols because “it’s just this once.” These shadow processes create vulnerabilities that your formal risk assessments will never capture.
Business resilience in AI requires acknowledging this gap between policy and practice. When a crisis hits, will your incident response plan work if key personnel are unavailable or if the attack targets the very communication systems your response depends on?
Data: More Than You Think, Everywhere You Don’t Expect
Most leaders dramatically underestimate their data footprint. Beyond your main databases, information flows through email threads, project management tools, customer service platforms, and countless other systems. That contract negotiation happening over WhatsApp? The client feedback stored in someone’s personal Google Drive? The financial projections shared via Dropbox? All potential entry points for cybercriminals operating in the AI revolution.
On top of knowing what data you have, asset awareness is about understanding where it goes, who touches it, and what would happen if it disappeared tomorrow.
The Evolving Threat Landscape
The rules of engagement have fundamentally changed. Where cybercriminals once relied on broad, scattergun approaches, AI now enables them to conduct surgical strikes targeting your specific business processes.
Artificial intelligence can now automate reconnaissance at scale, mapping your digital footprint faster than your security team can assess it. These systems go beyond just looking for technical vulnerabilities, identifying operational weaknesses:
- Which departments communicate most frequently?
- Who has access to what systems?
- When are your security teams likely to be understaffed?
- What communication styles does your leadership use?
The most concerning development is the rise of social engineering attacks that target specific roles and departments. A recent article from CrowdStrike points out that “AI tools can now conduct thousands of phone calls simultaneously, each highly personalised to mimic human conversation with impeccable grammar and even the ability to simulate voices familiar to the targeted individual.” Your HR team receives a perfectly crafted email about a “policy update” that matches your company’s communication style. Your finance director gets a call from someone who knows intimate details about your recent board meetings. These aren’t random attacks – they’re business intelligence operations designed to exploit the human elements that no firewall can protect.
Cyber resilience in the AI revolution means recognising that threats now evolve faster than traditional security measures can adapt. The question isn’t whether you’ll face an AI-enhanced attack, but whether your entire organisation will be ready when it happens.
Cross-Departmental Risk Assessment Questions
The first step toward building genuine cyber resilience is honest self-assessment. Most businesses have never systematically examined their vulnerabilities beyond the IT department. These questions will help you identify gaps that could become costly blind spots.
For Leadership Teams to Consider:
Finance & Accounting
- Who has access to your financial systems, and how do they verify payment requests?
- What happens when your finance director is on holiday and an “urgent” invoice arrives?
- How do you confirm the authenticity of bank detail changes from suppliers?
Human Resources
- What personal data do you hold, and where is it stored during onboarding and offboarding?
- Who can access employee records, and do you track when they do?
- How do you verify the identity of someone requesting sensitive employee information?
Marketing & Communications
- What customer data powers your campaigns, and who has access to it?
- Which external agencies or contractors can access your systems?
- How do you secure the multiple platforms where your brand has a presence?
Sales & Client Relations
- How do client communications actually happen day to day?
- What sensitive information gets shared in informal channels like WhatsApp or Teams?
- Who has access to your CRM data, and what could they do with it?
Operations
- What would happen if your primary systems went down for a week?
- Which manual workarounds would your team resort to?
- How dependent are your critical processes on specific individuals?
The Asset Awareness Challenge
If these questions feel uncomfortable, you’re not alone. Most businesses struggle to accurately inventory their digital assets because the landscape shifts constantly. New software gets added, employees create accounts, data gets shared, and suddenly your attack surface is far larger than anyone realises.
However, you can’t protect what you don’t know you have. Cross-departmental priorities often conflict, and these competing demands create the exact vulnerabilities that cybercriminals in the AI revolution are trained to exploit.
Building True Resilience
The shift from traditional cyber security thinking to genuine cyber resilience in the AI era requires a fundamental change in perspective: stop thinking you need to build higher walls when in reality it’s about creating an organisation that can bend without breaking when those walls inevitably face new forms of pressure. True business resilience in AI starts with accepting that prevention alone isn’t enough. The most sophisticated AI-driven attacks will find a way through, which means your business needs to excel at three critical capabilities:
- Rapid detection – spotting threats before they become disasters
- Coordinated response – acting swiftly across all departments when incidents occur
- Intelligent adaptation – learning and evolving from each experience
Cultural transformation is the foundation. When cyber resilience becomes “everyone’s responsibility” rather than “IT’s problem,” your entire organisation becomes a sensor network:
- Your marketing team starts questioning suspicious collaboration requests
- Your finance department develops verification habits that become second nature
- Your leadership team makes decisions with security implications front of mind, not as an afterthought
The companies that thrive in the AI revolution will be those that embed resilience thinking into their DNA, not as a constraint on business growth, but as an enabler of confident innovation. When you truly understand your risks, you can take bigger, bolder steps forward because you know exactly what you’re managing.
Get to Know Your Business Risks
Most business leaders discover that their understanding of organisational risk barely scratches the surface.
This is exactly why we’re hosting our Cyber Resilience in the AI Revolution event on 16 October 2025 at One Moorgate Place, London. This cyber security event, 2025, is designed specifically for business leaders, offering practical threat insights, resilience strategies you can implement immediately, and networking opportunities with leaders facing similar challenges.
Secure your seat to explore how to uncover and address hidden risks in your business.
