By Thomas Drohan Liz Kendall’s warning underscores a critical shift: in the age of AI, organisations must look beyond cybersecurity alone as risks increasingly emerge through trusted processes, people and decisions rather than just systems. In a recent letter to British business leaders, Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science Innovation and Technology, highlighted a growing concern: AI is changing the risk landscape faster than many organisations are adapting. As she warned, the risks organisations face in cyberspace are evolving, and familiar approaches are no longer keeping pace. Advanced AI tools are accelerating the discovery and exploitation of weaknesses, allowing threats to move more quickly, scale more broadly and remain concealed within legitimate activity. This is not simply an escalation of traditional cyber threats. It represents a shift in where and how harm occurs which is not through obvious system breaches, but though routine processes such as automated approval workflows, AI-assisted decision-making and the misuse of trusted access by people and systems that appear authorised to act. This might involve an AI-generated email that impersonates a senior executive to approve a payment or an AI tool that is legitimately integrated into operations but trained or prompted in ways that expose sensitive information. For business leaders, this creates a more fundamental challenge than improving technical defences. AI‑enabled threats are no longer contained within the IT or security function; they directly affect the organisation’s resilience, decision‑making and ability to operate with confidence. Put simply, cybersecurity capabilities on their own, even when technically strong, are no longer sufficient to manage AI‑driven risk. Security failures now arise as much from misplaced trust, fragmented ownership and slow institutional response as from unpatched systems. Leaders can therefore no longer afford to treat security as a discrete technical problem or rely on incremental improvements to controls. Addressing