Cybersecurity for UAE Business Leaders: Why AI Resilience Must Be a Boardroom Priority

As businesses across the UAE bring AI into everyday operations, cybersecurity decisions are becoming inseparable from business continuity. The risks are no longer limited to stolen data or isolated system outages. AI-enabled attacks, manipulated data, compromised identities and automated actions can affect how quickly an organisation can operate, respond and recover. In this conversation, Shadi Khuffash, Senior Regional Director of South Middle East at Fortinet, explains why business leaders need to look beyond prevention, address the growing skills gap and build stronger resilience into the way their organisations use AI.

What is the biggest cybersecurity challenge enterprises are still underestimating today?

Attackers are moving faster and are operating with more structure than most environments are designed to handle, and AI is accelerating both the pace and effectiveness of that activity. AI systems can leak sensitive data, be manipulated through adversarial inputs, or be coerced into unsafe behaviour through prompt injection. And agentic AI introduces additional complexity, as autonomous agents interact with other systems and identities without direct human oversight. At the same time, defenders are still grappling with fragmentation, governance gaps, and inconsistent visibility across systems.

And this is only part of the challenge UAE organisations are facing. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, a persistent trend is the blurring of lines between cybercrime and nation-state activity.

This has the effect that cybersecurity requirements in the UAE are evolving rapidly. One critical area that the C-Suite still often underestimates is the cybersecurity skills gap. Fortinet’s 2026 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report found that 91% of organizations are now using or experimenting with AI-powered cybersecurity solutions, yet 71% say the skills shortage still creates additional cyber risk. AI is arriving faster than the workforce can absorb it. 

How should CEOs and boards think differently about cyber risk as it becomes a business continuity issue?

The key is to build for Business Continuity in an AI-Augmented Enterprise. Large-scale disruption is not hypothetical as AI increases both the likelihood and the blast radius of failure. Because of this, business continuity planning will need to evolve accordingly.

To start, organisations to establish their Minimum Viable Business (MVB) with AI dependencies in mind. Which AI-driven systems are essential to keep operating? Which automated decisions need to be paused or overridden during an incident? What happens if a model, dataset, or agent becomes unavailable or untrustworthy?  

Resilience today means understanding not just how systems fail, but how AI amplifies those failures. Traditional continuity plans rarely account for AI behaviour under stress, and that must change. Similarly, tabletop exercises must now include AI failure scenarios, corrupted data pipelines, and autonomous actions that require rapid human intervention.

With AI changing both cyberattacks and cyber defence, where do you see the greatest risk and the greatest opportunity?

Cybercrime has become a structured and repeatable system. Instead of waiting for opportunities, attackers actively generate them through continuous reconnaissance of exposed infrastructure. By the time an alert is activated, the attacker often already has a thorough understanding of the environment and confirmed routes to exploit. Whilst detection remains important, it is no longer enough on its own because much of the critical work has already been done.

Attackers use AI to produce phishing material, create deepfakes and automate reconnaissance efforts. Meanwhile, defenders utilise AI to analyse signals, filter out noise, and speed up investigation and response processes.

The critical difference lies in how each side operates. Attackers are not constrained by system stability, compliance, or operational dependencies, enabling rapid iteration and seamless adoption of new capabilities. Conversely, defenders need to integrate AI into existing systems whilst ensuring reliability and control.

Of great importance is therefore to treat governance, visibility, and control as fundamental design elements rather than afterthoughts. Those that get that part right and look at cybersecurity from a platform perspective, will become more resilient, while incorporating AI into a fragmented environment doesn’t fix the core problems. 

Are organizations investing enough in resilience, or are many still too focused on prevention rather than response and recovery?

The problem is often not so much a lack of investment, but a lack of understanding on how to overcome complexity and fragmentation to build resilience. Board- and executive-level investment in a layered approach to cybersecurity – one that blends people, processes, and technology – is essential to build resilience in a time when AI is both a weapon and a shield and geopolitical tensions are spilling into corporate networks. The key is to assume disruption is inevitable and invest in business continuity, segmentation and recovery readiness. Threat actors innovate as quickly as technology evolves, which means that continuous learning and testing is now the modus operandi. 

What is one practical step every business leader should take now to improve cybersecurity readiness?

Understand that AI dissolves traditional organisational boundaries and act on that knowledge. Decisions once made by individuals are now distributed across systems, teams, and automated workflows. During incidents, this complexity can slow response if roles and responsibilities are unclear. 

At the same time, no organisation can build AI resilience in isolation but is dependent on collaboration. Internally, that means aligning security, IT, data science, legal, risk, and executive leadership on shared assumptions about AI risk and response. And externally, collaboration with peers, partners, and public-sector organisations becomes even more critical as AI-enabled threats scale globally.

This is why Fortinet works with local partners to use cybersecurity as a foundation for strengthening secure growth, including local infrastructure, advanced threat intelligence, and cybersecurity skills development.