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How EY can help
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Frontier AI models pose a risk to organizations that can be managed to protect growth, enterprise value, and shareholder confidence.
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It is not surprising to see OT and physical assets as the category most likely to fall in the vulnerability zone; these assets are often outside the cybersecurity function’s remit. In the past, this might have been an acceptable risk for boards. Now, as physical AI proliferates and previously firewalled assets are increasingly connected to networks — all while the threat to OT from frontier AI grows — CISOs should be leading the effort to protect these assets. This starts by gaining better visibility of the attack surface.
Ecosystems and third parties, the second-most represented category in the vulnerability zone, are increasingly important for organizations’ critical operations, from software and cloud infrastructure to logistics and service delivery. As their criticality grows, they increasingly require persistent, privileged access to internal networks and environments, which materially expands the attack surface. Agentic AI may intensify these dynamics, as effective deployment requires AI vendors to have pervasive access across multiple functions or across entire organizations.
Adversaries are capitalizing on this exposure, frequently targeting third parties as an initial access vector before pivoting laterally into primary target environments. To decrease this exposure without limiting critical third-party relationships, CISOs should close foundational control gaps found by our survey: 47% of organizations fail to properly segment their environments, and 59% lack comprehensive asset telemetry, reducing visibility and delaying detection.