The coming twelve months may be the most consequential ever in cybersecurity for SMBs. The advent of widespread GenAI tools will empower both legitimate users as well as criminals to do more, faster, and more creatively.
Larger organisations are likely to have their AI principles, sandbox implementations, and be forging ahead with use cases. But for SMBs, there’s a massive need to become proficient in using the best tools, processes, and training to ensure they don’t fall victim to the scale and sophistication of AI-powered fraudsters and thieves.
And that’s leaving aside the worries about falling behind if they don’t adopt AI-driven business processes as fast as competitors.
No matter the type of business, AI and automation will disrupt it. Every organisation has some digital footprint that could be tweaked with automation, or a digital presence to be defended from cybercriminals and incidents. As the government suggests, the risks of data poisoning, hijacking outputs, stealing or corrupting data, money, or processing time, are realistic. But smaller firms face a bigger challenge in coming to grips with and preparing for both the potential risks and rewards of the AI-driven future.
Prepare For The Upsides
Firstly, note that AI will be just like any other technology in having both positive and negative effects that are hard to predict. As a relic of AI’s foretelling in science fiction, the concept has been around for decades, likely contributing to both highly positive and negative expectations.
But AI is already bringing many upsides. Businesses needn’t only focus on the generative AI popularised by ChatGPT and Midjourney, which became the standard bearers for the GenAI explosion into popular culture. AI is also present in other forms, within more constrained business software, quietly supporting tasks like error-correcting, pattern spotting, and forecasting. It’s using the power of data analysis to provide answers to questions, sometimes questions that haven’t been asked, or that teams might not even be able to phrase.
SMBs without a plan to incorporate tools that make use of AI, in any form, should think about what they would do if competitors became an arbitrary percentage more efficient, faster, or more customer focussed by their own adoption.
That’s the reality now, as AI-driven business software finds incremental ways to improve the power of their teams.
Success comes most immediately from finding limited use cases where there’s a proven need for a helping hand. HR may need help sifting through applicant submissions. The tech team may need help managing, triaging, and prioritising infrastructure and SaaS alerts. The sales and marketing teams may be crying out for a helper to organise meetings, transcribe calls, and send leads down the pipeline without requiring laborious typing.
Prepare For The Downsides
Cybersecurity has evolved with the changing nature of malicious threats. AI is helping cybercriminals, too. Small businesses should be alert as much as multi-nationals. This year the news broke that an employee transferred $26m to scammers. They thought it was all signed off by their CFO because they had been on a video call with deepfakes of their colleagues. Today, that is a tactic being employed against large firms. Just as with every trick, once it has been refined, less advanced criminals will be employing it against smaller targets as part of cybercrime-as-a-service attacks.
Strong data security, device, and endpoint security, and more than minimum compliance standards must be employed by every business.
For smaller businesses, knowing staff and customers will become key. Digital identity and access management, liveness detection, and trust management are essential to understand and implement.
There is good news about the bad news. By staying up to date with evolving technology and security trends, and ensuring the business SaaS solutions are current, SMBs should be able to source enterprise-level security. But they must proactively explore the risks and topics involved and train and challenge staff in the correct procedures – and what to do with even the smallest of red flags.
Find expert support and listen to best practices on every aspect of the AI future: technology, people management, training, and right-sized business processes.
A deepfake of the boss might be utterly convincing, but if it’s already been discussed that they never request sensitive data, or money movements, except over a certain app, or without confirming via two methods, staff will stick to safe behaviour.
Prepare For A People-centric Future
It might seem strange to focus on people, but that’s exactly what AI will allow SMBs to do. The right AI use cases will abstract pain points away from customer-facing teams and empower business service roles. This matters more the smaller the business, where every success counts for more than at larger organisations with more hands.
The employee experience will define who will want to work for you. The personalised experience offered to customers will set the business apart. The right creative solution will appeal to the new prospect, unhappy with their current provider. All that rests on empowered people, able to offer the best of themselves because their toil has been removed with automation extending reach and speeding activity. They can give the best of themselves to human tasks, being creative, empathetic, and strategic.
The Future Is Now
SMBs can see the near future more clearly than we could at the dawn of the personal PC age, the mobile age, or the cloud age. The AI age has been well forecast.
The challenge for SMBs now is to:
- Grasp the nettle and ensure that their risk and security profiles are well understood and managed before deepfakes, fraud, and novel attacks find them.
- Grow familiarity and success with defined use cases, building expertise in the business.
- Make sure the technical is in service to the personal, using AI for defined business purposes, improving every stakeholder experience, and defining what great outcomes look like.
John Mutuski Is Chief Information Security Officer at Pipedrive
Image: CreativaImages
Source: Cyber Security Intelligence
