There is no such thing as ‘designing an artificial intelligence (AI) strategy’ because AI should be part of the business strategy. Before you start designing an AI system, ask yourself this: what are your business challenges and how can technology deliver value and assist your employees?
Security is one of the biggest headaches for any organisation. Hackers are constantly looking for weak spots to break into the data bank. In truth, they only need to strike once to get lucky, whereas an organisation requires an army of people to work around the clock to stop bad actors from breaking in.
The industry is already struggling to find talent with the right skills sets to take on these roles. The sheer volume of work required to detect, predict and act on these threats is growing by the day, and becoming increasingly more difficult to spot with the naked eye. Put simply, security protection cannot be managed by humans alone, but automation technology gives us a fighting chance to take back control.
The role of AI in security
A recent study by HfS Research, conducted in partnership with IPsoft, found that C-level executives are optimistic about the role AI can play in helping improve data security. In the study, 59 per cent of respondents said they are pleased with the security benefits gained by implementing cognitive tools. “Improved security is an unanticipated benefit of cognitive technology projects,” the report states. “Many cognitive tools have security and privacy in-built by design. We are now getting used to machine learning and AI providing threat intelligence, detection, and response.”
Unfortunately, only 13 per cent of the HfS survey’s respondents consider improved security a top priority for deploying AI – a sign that the tremendous benefits that AI brings to security overall have thus far been overlooked.
Case studies: how companies are using AI to prevent cyberattacks
One online gaming company hired Amelia to prevent phishing attacks by verifying a gamer’s identity before answering customer service queries. Created by IPsoft, Amelia has the ability to detect fraud, stop network attacks, and monitor for business anomalies at scale.
The company deployed Amelia to vet out fraud among their chat customers, flagging potential “phishers” to a human agent for additional authentication. When presented with customer information, Amelia followed up with the correct line of questioning with more than 99 per cent accuracy. She was able to detect on her own that approximately 4 per cent of total chats were phishers. By doing this, she saved hundreds of hours of wasted labour – and prevented potential hacks and data thefts.
AI-driven security can also protect employee onboarding and minimise insider threats to any organisation. Take Carestream Health as an example. It is a global provider of medical imaging systems and IT solutions that is piloting IPsoft’s AI platform to assist in onboarding processes for new workers.
Carestream has hired Amelia to automate the delivery of laptops, cell phones, systems access, corporate credit cards, or travel accounts (depending on what a new employee has been issued). Rather than involving several people who each conduct a small part of this multi-step process, Amelia via 1Desk was hired to run end-to-end onboarding. As a result, she was able to reduce the entire onboarding activity to 10 minutes. For processes that can’t be automated, Amelia creates a ticket to escalate the task to an employee.
Since introducing AI in to the company, Carestream has increased the security of the information being processed and reduced the risk of errors that can trigger security and regulatory issues.
Using AI as the frontline of defence
Security is top priority of any organisation. As such, it should be at the core of any AI system, regardless of its scale, how it’s deployed and in which industry.
AI platforms like Amelia offers organisations the agility to be deployed on-premise and on the cloud, in order to provide the most secure deployment option available with fewer points of data transit. Instead of pulling customer data onto a public cloud and then into a network, Amelia operates with direct links to all necessary data sources. She can still interact with customers and colleagues via the internet, but the number of potential data vulnerabilities that could be accessed by hackers is greatly reduced.
AI is designed specifically to enhance human potential. It is created to eliminate routine work and free human talent to focus on innovation. By introducing AI into the frontline defence system, business leaders can deploy their employees to drive business value and tackle other creative tasks that only humans can do.
The opinions expressed in this post belong to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.