Many UAE organisations today are laser-focused on agentic AI, which promises to deliver significant gains in productivity and innovation of benefit to the nation.
At the same time, many face challenges in navigating the lightning fast changes that AI is driving. Organisations must address the growing trust gap, particularly across security, privacy and infrastructure.
‘Trust’ has become an increasingly prominent part of discussions around AI. Without foundational trust, employees and customers are less likely to use AI to its full potential. And as Jeetu Patel, Cisco President and Chief Product Office has recently stated, there is also a strong competitive dimension to trust in AI: “The ability to delegate a task in a trusted form is going to be the difference between being a market leader versus being bankrupt”.
The ability to deploy AI securely and with trust will be a defining factor for organisations as they scale AI adoption. In the age of agentic AI, trust cannot be treated as a feature layered on at the end. It must be woven into the fabric of an organisation’s infrastructure.
Cisco has identified five critical ways to close the AI trust gap across an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape:
Five ways to secure the agentic enterprise
- Establish the fundamentals: Attackers often target low-hanging fruit. Organisations must ensure basic security controls are upgraded, including phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, strong identity verification, least-privilege access, including for AI agents, and Zero Trust architectures. Patching, asset visibility, and configuration management are equally essential.
- Upgrade your infrastructure: Given today’s advanced threats, structural vulnerabilities are not an option. End-of-life systems that cannot be patched, upgraded or supported must be replaced. Modern platforms should include advanced protections such as memory safety mechanisms and exploit mitigations, designed to be flexible enough to address future threats.
- Defend at machine speed: The human mind cannot comprehend the scale, adaptability, and speed of today’s threats. Automation is a must-have. Organisations must invest in machine-speed detection, automated triage and containment, and continuous monitoring of identity and data activity.
- Embed your defences: Analysing an attack after the fact is no longer sufficient. Defences must be embedded directly within the workload, device, and traffic path. Implementing in-line enforcement mechanisms, runtime protections, and updateable exploit shields allows security controls to act in real time.
- Unleash your own AI: The best defence against AI-empowered attackers is AI-empowered defence. Security teams must use AI for threat hunting, conformance testing, digital twins, and validation. With agentic AI acting as a virtual team member, organisations can compress deployment cycles from months to days.
Cisco offers a comprehensive portfolio of AI-powered, platform-based networking, security, and observability solutions that cover all these critical categories. By combining these capabilities with Cisco services and the company’s leadership in responsible AI usage, organisations can join the AI revolution with confidence.
For a deeper dive into ensuring the trusted adoption of agentic AI, read Cisco’s white paper, Shields Up: Guidance for defending in the age of AI-enabled attacks.
Image Credit: Cisco
Source: Tahawul Tech