Unleashing the Power of AI & ML: How CISOs Can Reduce Risk and Enable the Business

By Ashish Garg, Founder & Managing Partner, RIGA Cyber

The threat landscape never ceases to evolve and sometimes, we CISOs and security leaders can feel as though we are facing an uphill battle. The sheer volume of data, the sophistication of attacks, and the constant pressure to enable business innovation demand a new approach. 

Thankfully, the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) offer a powerful arsenal to combat these challenges. CISOs can leverage these technologies to reduce cyber risk, accelerate decision-making, and ultimately, become strategic business enablers.

As someone with years of spearheading security initiatives that fortify global enterprises against evolving cyber threats, I am particularly excited about the potential for AI and ML to empower security leaders and drive innovation in four key areas:

Predictively Reducing Cyber Risk

Preventing and avoiding risk is a monumental task, and that is one of the reasons most enterprise organizations utilize over 50 tools to support their security initiatives. With each one generating its own alerts, notifications, and data it can be even harder to predict where the next attack might come from. Leveraging automation to manage that data flow efficiently and analyze and report performance is a crucial first step to reducing your cyber risk. Now with AI and ML, you can take that analysis to a deeper level. This is why I believe solutions like Onyxia’s Predictive Cybersecurity Management Engine, OnyxAI, can provide security leaders with so much value. This kind of technology can quickly find anomalies and patterns in vast datasets over time and provide accurate predictions to proactively identify areas of risk exposure.

Enhancing Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience requires more than attack prevention. It demands that security teams can quickly recover and continue operating even when faced with constant threats. AI and ML are essential for improving resilience by allowing for proactive threat detection, adaptable response mechanisms, and automated recovery processes. AI and ML enable this by transforming security operations from rigid and reactive, to proactive and dynamic with more realistic simulations, helping teams discover vulnerabilities before adversaries exploit them. By integrating AI and ML into their cyber resilience strategies, CISOs can shift from reactive defense to a proactive, self-healing security posture — ensuring business continuity. 

Accelerating Decision-Making

Distilling the overwhelming amounts of data presents another challenge for CISOs who are constantly faced with complex decisions regarding security investments, cyber defense strategies, and resource allocation. AI can correlate across an entire data ecosystem and provide valuable insights to support these decisions by prioritizing actionable intel based on the most pressing needs. As a CISO you can optimize your teams to be more efficient in managing vulnerabilities and your security stack by finding gaps and overlaps in coverage and opportunities to improve performance and ROI. With so much noise in the security environment, the ability to quickly and accurately gain program insights and make critical decisions is key.

Enabling the Business

Global factors are causing executive leadership and boards to have more comprehensive and quantifiable conversations about cybersecurity. I see this more and more in my advisory work as the Founder and Managing Partner of RIGA Cyber. This shift puts an additional burden on CISOs to improve how they communicate their security initiatives and translate their program data from technical performance details into actionable insights. AI can automate the process of cybersecurity program monitoring and reporting, allow security leaders to forecast the impact of security program resource changes, and uncover important findings that not only affect the organization’s security posture but also impact the health of the entire business. 

I am a big believer in the way Onyxia is harnessing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to reduce risk and accelerate better business outcomes. By embracing AI and ML, CISOs can transform their security programs from reactive to predictive, ensure cyber resilience, and empower businesses to innovate with confidence. 

The key is to strategically integrate AI into existing security workflows, prioritize use cases that deliver the greatest impact, and ensure that AI is implemented securely. In doing so, we as security leaders can enhance our role as valuable business partners, driving growth and resilience in the digital age.