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AI Is Raising the Bar for Cybersecurity Talent
AI can process alerts faster than people ever could. The harder part is knowing when its answer is wrong.
ITSEC Asia
For cybersecurity teams, AI is quickly moving from something experimental to something people actually use.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 found that 77% of surveyed organizations had adopted AI for cybersecurity. It is already being used for tasks such as phishing detection, intrusion response and user-behaviour analysis.
That sounds like good news for teams struggling with workload. And mostly, it is.
But AI doesn’t remove the need for skilled cybersecurity professionals. It changes what those professionals need to be good at.
Automation Can Do More. So Humans Have to Do More Too.
The same WEF research found that 54% of organizations considered insufficient knowledge or skills a barrier to using AI effectively in cybersecurity. Another 41% pointed to the need for human oversight.
That second number matters.
AI can analyse enormous amounts of information quickly. What it still struggles with is context: whether an unusual event is genuinely dangerous, how a technical issue affects the business and what action makes sense when the available information is incomplete.
Cybersecurity professionals increasingly need to:
- Validate AI-generated findings rather than accept them automatically
- Recognise when an automated recommendation doesn’t fit the situation
- Investigate activity across cloud, endpoint, identity and network environments
- Connect technical findings with actual business risk
- Make decisions when there isn’t a neat textbook answer
In other words, knowing how to use AI is becoming useful. Knowing when not to trust it may be even more useful.
Indonesia Is Facing the Same Shift
Komdigi has been making a similar point.
In August 2026, Vice Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs Nezar Patria said AI was changing both cyber defence and cybercrime. He warned that agentic AI could allow attacks to operate more autonomously while AI-assisted social engineering and deepfakes were becoming harder to recognise.
His response was not simply “use more technology.”
Komdigi has called for stronger AI-based cybersecurity talent, closer collaboration between universities and industry and a move toward security by design, where security becomes part of how systems are built rather than something added after problems appear.
That requires people who understand both the tools and the consequences of using them.
Training Has to Catch Up With the Job
The World Economic Forum ranks networks and cybersecurity among the three fastest-growing skills expected through 2030. It also argues that as AI takes over more repetitive security tasks, professionals will spend more time on oversight, governance and higher-level decision-making.
That changes what good cybersecurity training should look like.
Learning concepts still matters. Certifications still have a role. But professionals also need opportunities to investigate, test assumptions and make decisions in conditions that resemble actual operations.
That is the direction behind ITSEC Cyber & AI Academy, which combines cybersecurity learning with hands-on exercises and scenarios informed by ITSEC Asia’s operational experience.
The goal isn’t to train people to compete with AI at processing information faster.
Machines already have a fairly comfortable lead there.
The goal is to develop professionals who know what the information means and what to do next.
Explore practical cybersecurity and AI training at ITSEC Cyber & AI Academy.
