Mastering the Hype Cycle: How Cybersecurity Leaders Win With AI

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
AI is everywhere, but what does it mean for your business? Gartner is the world authority on AI, with more than 200,000 client conversations and more than 6,000 written insights on AI in 2025 alone. Leaders across the C-suite, just like you, are partnering with Gartner to turn AI ambition into impact. Go to gartner.com/ai to learn more. Today, we're exploring one of the biggest forces reshaping cybersecurity right now, AI hype. It's everywhere. It's relentless. And according to Gartner experts, Christine Lee and Leigh McMullen, it might actually be the advantage cybersecurity leaders have been waiting for. In this preview of the opening keynote from the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, Christine and Leigh reveal a new way for CISOs to lead in a world fueled by hype. From navigating inflated expectations to harnessing change energy for real organizational impact, they show how security leaders can stop resisting the hype cycle and start using it to drive mission-aligned, innovation-ready cybersecurity programs. Now, here's Christine Lee and Leigh McMullen.

**Christine Lee** (1:27)
Our industry and indeed our world has a way of staying exciting and challenging. Today, we're going to talk about one of the biggest challenges that we in cyber face. Hype. And more specifically, how we can recognize and harness hype to strengthen cybersecurity leadership.

**Leigh McMullen** (1:47)
Think of all of the extravagant claims that make something new seem like the only thing you need to care about right now. Hype makes it hard to think straight, hard to chart that steady path forward. But what if, what if we could actually harness hype to benefit you, your teams and your organizations?

**Christine Lee** (2:09)
Our organizations are making aggressive technology investments to achieve their goals, especially in leading-edge hyped areas like generative AI and AI agents. 74% of CEOs believe that AI is the technology that will most significantly impact their industries over the next three years. And 84% of tech executives are increasing their AI investments this year. Here's why that matters for you.
85% of CEOs think cyber security is not just critical to protecting the organization today, but is in fact critical to growth.

**Leigh McMullen** (2:50)
And accordingly, tech leaders are increasing cyber security funding. 87% of them. 69% of those folks say that managing cyber security and other technology risks are going to be their top focus area. What they plan to spend most of their time working on over the next 12 months. I don't know about y'all, but across our C-suite and board, all of our surveys are pointing in the same direction. Cybersecurity incidents are now hitting the bottom line, so executives are paying attention to cyber security.

**Christine Lee** (3:22)
And what Leigh just said right now is great news for us. The organization's job is to balance the potential reward and risk of innovation. And a key component of the CISO's role is to help the organization understand and manage cybersecurity risk. Seems like a great match, right? At least in theory. But in reality, we know that our relationship with the broader organization can be tense. Some folks in our organizations like to move fast and break things.
And some folks in cybersecurity would love to bubble wrap everything. But this tension between us and the broader organization gets worse in a hype-driven world where everyone's bombarded by the promise of new technology. Shiny unicorns everywhere. Hype can push our organizations into investing too much, too fast. But hype around what could go wrong can also push cyber and risk teams into the opposite problem. Slowing things down to the point of missing critical market opportunities. Hype, if we're not careful, can derail our partnership with the organization.

**Leigh McMullen** (4:44)
Now, you all might just be tempted to be like one of my kids at this point, particularly with all this AI hype, just stick your fingers, try and tune it all out. But that too would be kind of a mistake, really. Hype often contains at least a kernel of truth and signals change. We can't just ignore or avoid progress. New technology is going to be coming, whether our cybersecurity teams are ready for it or not. And honestly, if we want to help our organizations thrive in this super competitive landscape, you need to actually lean into hype. You need to harness hype. Using other people's hype or change energy to fuel your agenda? Well, that's the political power move in what people call interesting times.

**Christine Lee** (5:31)
We invite you to become students of hype so that you can learn how to detect it, figure out the patterns, and harness it effectively to develop a versatile cybersecurity program. And we can start that journey with Gartner's hype cycle. For those of you who are less familiar, the hype cycle was initially created to help you learn where a technology is at in terms of adoption and maturity, which makes it a great tool to help manage and harness hype. For example, when a technology is on its way up the slope, there are several benefits to becoming an early adopter. You could gain advantage over competitors, or use a vendor's own hype to get them to develop capabilities that benefit you. The peak of inflated expectations, well, that's when you're most at risk of being taken in by hype. When everyone is screaming, buy, buy, buy, you can't help but wonder what they're seeing that you're not. If the technology survived the trough, you can see which ones have demonstrated real-world value for many.