Executives are short on time, pressed with responsibilities, and expected to provide answers at a moment’s notice. They must stay on top of the technologies that impact their businesses, but often can’t slog through an expansive annual report. Fortunately, the CXO REvolutionaries Quarterly Cyber Update covers today’s relevant cybersecurity and IT topics in a few short pages. It’s packed with information and graphics that quickly convey the data leaders need to make informed decisions.
Q3 2024: AI Trends and Security Insights for the C-Suite
AI has been a hot topic since ChatGPT-3 was unveiled in 2023. Its release fueled a firestorm of interest in large language models (LLMs), generative AI (genAI), and related technologies. To understand how AI is commanding global attention, we compared its Google search score to other worldwide topics of interest like “elections” and “Olympics.”
The Zscaler threat research team, ThreatLabz, witnessed this same level of interest in the AI-related transactions of private and public organizations as well. They observed AI-related traffic growth in the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange from April 2023 to January 2024. To provide a sense of scale, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange processes over 400 billion transactions and 5 trillion security signals from around the world every day. During the nine month timeframe, ThreatLabz saw AI transactions increase by 594%. The most popular platforms for AI traffic were ChatGPT, Drift, OpenAI (non-ChatGPT), Writer, and LivePerson.
The three largest users of AI tools were the manufacturing, finance and insurance, and services sector, accounting for 57.6% of all traffic. The industries using AI the least included energy, education, and government who collectively contributed 6.7% of all AI-related traffic.
AI is conquering the internet
Although businesses are widely adopting AI, it can be difficult to tell how much of this practice is visible to the end user. Are businesses primarily using AI for internal processes, or is it shaping customer-facing aspects of the business? Researchers at Graphite, an AI-powered SEO platform, studied the prevalence of AI-generated content on the internet. They searched 2,200 keywords across 10 highly-traffic topics and analyzed the content returned. This gave them material from 20,280 URLs, which they scanned for signs of AI involvement by using Originality.AI.
They discovered a whopping 49.1% of internet content they reviewed showed signs of AI-assistance or total AI-generation. This finding is remarkable, and raises several questions about how businesses plan to use AI in the future. For example, are we on a path to a mostly AI-generated internet? Will future AI training on AI-generated web content lead to model collapse? How will AI change your online marketing, customer outreach, and web-based support operations?
Big insights, little effort
The CXO REvolutionaries Quarterly Cyber Update covers a range of executive-level topics in a few short pages. Our latest installment, AI Trends and Security Insights for the C-Suite, looks at how quickly the technology is proliferating and impacting our lives. Readers will discover how people across age brackets and demographics feel about AI in the workplace. They will learn how the technology introduces security flaws and some fundamental concerns about AI that have some organizations withholding adoption. The report also examines multiple benefits of AI that many organizations hope will give them a competitive edge.
In a marketplace saturated with AI-hype, our report quickly delivers solid information and recommendations to tech leaders looking for guidance. Download a copy of The CXO REvolutionaries Quarterly Cyber Update: AI Trends and Security Insights for the C-Suite, here.
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