Cybersecurity’s Tower of Babel: Why we are still lost in translation When leadership teams and security functions operate in different languages of risk, critical signals might be dismissed until the problem has escalated DeeperDive is a beta AI feature. Refer to full articles for the facts. BUSINESS leaders like to believe that in a crisis, the enterprise will instinctively pull together. Experience suggests otherwise. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is a useful reminder: Projects do not fail because of a lack of ambition; they fail because people stop understanding one another. Today’s corporate world is living out a digital version of that myth. Boards, leadership teams and IT departments confront the same cybersecurity threats, but describe them in mutually unintelligible languages. Boards speak of risk appetite and shareholder value while IT teams speak of zero trust, telemetry and patch management. For years, this mismatch was tolerated. Cybersecurity was treated as a “black box” technical issue delegated to the chief investment officer or chief information security officer (CISO). That era is over. The “it’s too technical” defence has expired, dismantled by two shifts: the evolution of fiduciary duty and the democratisation of knowledge via artificial intelligence, even as the same technology accelerates the threats organisations now face. Navigate Asia in a new global order Get the insights delivered to your inbox. At the same time, AI is reshaping the threat landscape itself. Recent reports have warned that attackers are using AI to move faster and operate at greater scale, compressing the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation. As more advanced AI models enter real-world testing, organisations are being forced to contend not just with more sophisticated threats, but with the speed at which they unfold. Research also highlights how persistent this disconnect remains. A study by IANS Research