“Ask for more money, but have a plan,” he says. “Especially a plan that incorporates the fact that you’re not going to get everything you ask for.”
The debate, in other words, isn’t really about whether to spend — it’s about whether security leaders can articulate why clearly enough to be heard.
Whether the advent of AI is enough to boost budgets, it’s clear that frontier AI, autonomous enterprise systems, and executive fear of falling behind competitors have suddenly aligned cybersecurity with core business strategy.
The result would be the most significant shift in enterprise security spending since the rise of cloud computing — not because leaders suddenly fear cyberattacks more, but because they increasingly view cybersecurity as the operational foundation that makes large-scale AI adoption possible.
