AI is moving fast, how about you?

Depending on how much you read about AI and its impact on the workplace you've probably seen one of these two schools of thought: "AI will eventually take your job" or "AI won't take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will."

If AI is the bear, how fast are you running at work?

Understanding We're All Figuring This Out

If you're a mid-career or senior security professional, you have seen no shortage of dramatic swings over the course of the last 15-25 years and in many ways, adoption of AI can be seen as another change to contend with. Conversely, if you are in your first few years of working and GenAI has been something you can't imagine not using for work and personal life, you may have to be patient with the rest of us getting to that level of comfort. At an enterprise level, companies are also in a weird position encouraging employees to adopt AI for efficiency while trying to shoehorn solutions into meaningful processes change that will result in savings, speed, and advantage over competitors.

Key Components of Your Personal AI Journey

1. Up your AI Game

   By now I hope you've dipped your toe into the AI water or you're wading waist-deep in comfort of the shallows. Beyond using GenAI to help you in your work product and getting help managing your inbox and calendar, get more conversant. Do some research and try striking up a conversation about Agentic AI with someone else. Be able to confidently explain what happened in the Hugging Face incident in July. To accomplish all of these you'll need to find trusted sources, understand the terms and go down a rabbit hole or two.

   
   

2. Adapt, Adopt and Don't Look Back

   If you haven't already discovered how GenAI can make you more efficient and productive, you haven't adopted enough and you're at risk of not adapting (see bear cartoon above). Adopting these tools will give you confidence they will quickly become second nature. If you can build an agent, you'll know that it's not that hard and will be a big confidence boost. If your organization isn't moving as fast as you are, look for ways to be an evangelist and nudge them in the necessary direction.

   
   

3. Find Ways to Improve Your Core Work

   The final step is moving beyond the efficiency tools everyone is using and bringing AI to your core function(s). In security, like many functions, there is a ton of data - physical and logical access control logs, theft and loss data, and incidents to name just a few. You already have all of this data unique to your organization that you've been working with day to day. Processing that data into insights is what GenAI does best but you know your function better than the machines and agents do (at least for now).