Is AI Changing the Cybersecurity Game?

Tim Elliott (0:00)

It's the Morning Drive, it is event season in Dubai. The calendar is packed. Last week, it was the International Property Show. This week, it's the Arabian travel market. And starting today, the region's huge cyber security is something of a mega event, really. It's JISEC Global 2026 So we've got thousands of tech leaders converging on the city. The stakes have kind of never been higher. Cyber threats are evolving at breakneck pace. And security experts are warning that traditional monitoring tools can no longer keep up. So at JISEC, cyber security provider Obrela is really showcasing how agentic AI and advanced analytics are moving businesses from reacting to attacks to predicting and preventing them.

Stephen Marriott is with me. He's a cyber security expert with Obrela. Welcome back to you, Stephen.

Stephen Marriott (0:57)

Good morning, Tim.

Tim Elliott (0:59)

Nice to see you. So we're live during a massive week for Dubai Tech. This is a big deal. This is kind of your conference, dedicated to cyber security.

Walking the floor, and I know it starts this morning, you're about to head there, but what's the overriding mood, do you think, among enterprise leaders when it comes to, I mean, let's put it this way, that the cyber threat landscape is increasingly sophisticated.

Stephen Marriott (1:25)

Yes, yeah. And this event was actually scheduled for early in the year as well. So they moved it because of the conflict. And I think that's why we've got so many events happening, not just here in Dubai, but across the region. So I was actually in Qatar the week before, and then Saudi Arabia the week before that. So we got like a lot of events ramping up, but it does mean, you know, because of what's been happening, lots of new technologies, how technology has been utilized, even the conflict kind of was showing, you know, what other things have started to happen, where you've got the alignment to military activities or regional geopolitical situations. And I think this is the first time we're doing the event at Expo City. It's normally done at Dubai World Trade Center. It's always badgers, one of the biggest cyber security events in the region, but covering the Middle East and Africa is very big. So it's going to be interesting how big it's going to be at Expo City. I might say it opens this morning, but there's going to be lots of talk. And from the last fortnight or so, I've been attending other events across the GCC.

The main talk is around obviously how AI has been utilized. I think more recently, we've had some news articles where they're scared of mongering a bit on what AI could potentially do. But let's come back to reality on where we are and how we actually use it.

It is still this assistance role more so, rather than going off and doing actions or this Skynet theory, where it's going to start a nuclear war. We're nowhere near to that kind of things. And at the end of the day, humans are still here.

We're telling the AI what to do. We're prompting it what to do. We're giving it workflows. We're giving it instructions. We're giving it actions. It's not, it goes off and magically decides, I'm going to do this. You've tasked it to do something and it's trying to complete that task. So this is pretty much where we are right now.

Tim Elliott (3:21)

Okay. So, GISAC Global is, it's a big deal. It's a big regional event.

What does being here in 2026, tell us about where the industry is headed, particularly when it comes to obviously AI, Artificial Intelligence, and when it comes to cyber resilience?

Stephen Marriott (3:40)

Yeah. So, if you look right now, you can see it, obviously, putting that full resilience in place, having that full continuous monitoring in place, yeah.

You start to see more and more companies providing managed detection and response services. They're doing the threat hunting. So, the service offering is increasing, yeah, to actually make sure you got that full visibility. Hooking in AI to give you more capabilities. So, we were discussing this at the start, like the agentic AI piece, how can that be utilized? How can the AI assist you more in your day-to-day run-ins? And I think, for me, just like the past few weeks, I was discussing as well, the controls and risk assessments that you're using against AI.

So, I think pretty much everyone now is using AI in some way or form into the day-to-day, whether it's in social media or research or when you work. But for corporates, what assessments have they done against those AI tools? Do you know who's using what AI tools are? Which ones are you subscribed to? Who's monitoring it? Who's looking at the logs? What data are you sharing with the AI?