Most corporate leaders now agree that cybersecurity is a vital business function. But dig deeper and their reasons for saying so may differ. Cyber is often still viewed primarily through a lens of minimizing business risk, rather than enabling growth. Yet new research posits a different way to think about the function.
It reveals that nearly half of businesses have been forced to halt digital transformation projects due to cyber threats. By the same logic, cyber should be viewed as an essential prerequisite for digital-enabled growth.
The world in 2025 is an uncertain place. Geopolitically, the rules-based order of the past 80+ years is unravelling before our eyes. Economic shocks abound. Inflation remains dangerously elevated and interest rates are still high enough to discourage investment by many firms. Against this troubling backdrop, digital offers a rare glimmer of hope for growth.
Generative (GenAI) and agentic AI offer potentially huge gains in productivity, cost efficiency and innovation. McKinsey estimates that GenAI alone could add the equivalent of $2.6tn to $4.4tn annually to the global economy, including $200-340bn to the banking sector and $400-660bn to retail. In one example, the consultancy reveals how AI could be used to power every layer of a modern financial institution, from its operating model and core data layer to decision making and customer engagement strata.
Agentic AI offers potentially even greater gains, given its ability to work autonomously and dynamically to complete tasks set for it. For example, the tech could be used to assess and underwrite loans—hitherto a burdensome and time-consuming process for staff.
Yet security risk inevitably poses challenges to this vision of technology-powered growth. Cybercriminals and nation state actors are on the hunt for data to sell, hold for ransom and/or use to enrich other companies. And AI requires huge quantities of it, which could be stolen or even poisoned to sabotage large language models (LLMs). In the aforementioned research, data breaches were cited as the biggest security threat by 44% of respondents.
AI can also be used to give the bad guys a hand. Almost three-quarters (74%) of IT decision-makers agree that AI-powered attacks significantly threaten their organization’s security. It offers a potential uplift in social engineering, target selection, vulnerability exploitation, writing of malicious post-exploitation scripts, and much more—allowing threat actors to ramp up the speed and scale of attacks.
Yet if 49% of global firms have been forced to delay or completely halt digital transformation initiatives due to such concerns, the solution seems quite obvious. Data-centric security must be prioritized to provide the peace of mind that new digital plans will not be disrupted by breaches.
This is cybersecurity not as a means simply to mitigate risk and protect the status quo, but to provide a platform for empowering businesses to grow. Tokenization, for example, protects critical data while ensuring it can still be used by AI-powered cloud analytics and other tools to inform data-driven decision making.
The key is to get ahead of cyber threats. The same research reveals 58% of organizations only respond as an attack occurs or after the damage has already been done. But the vast majority (81%) of respondents claim that a more proactive posture is a top goal. A comprehensive data discovery, classification and protection strategy would reduce the likelihood of breaches which can bring operations (including digital projects) to a halt. And it would satisfy compliance bosses that sensitive information can be used by AI models without exposing it to regulatory risks.
It’s time to start thinking about proactive, data-centric security as a growth enabler.
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