Business leaders are adopting AI rapidly but face growing threats from AI-powered cyber attacks. Haris Pylarinos, CEO and founder of Hack The Box, emphasizes that while AI empowers defenders, it equally empowers criminals. He stresses that merely adopting AI is insufficient; success requires investing in skilled personnel who can guide AI outputs and intervene when needed.

Pylarinos notes that cyber threats evolve at breakneck speed, making real resilience dependent on combining modern tools with human expertise. Framing cyber readiness as 'employees versus automation' is outdated; workforce capabilities are central to effective AI investment. Hack The Box, with over 800 enterprise customers and a global community of 4m+ cybersecurity professionals, enables organizations to develop, exercise, and measure cyber workforce skills through simulated threat-informed learning, hands-on labs, and live-fire environments.

The platform helps CISOs demonstrate resilience by tracking metrics like vulnerability detection speed in simulated pentests, not days without breaches. Gibb Witham, Hack The Box's president, adds that human skill remains essential, comparing cybersecurity teams to pilots needing simulators. AI effectiveness depends entirely on user domain expertise, as sophisticated attackers combine AI with human intelligence.

Fully automated defenses risk being outsmarted, making human-AI collaboration critical in this unique adversarial landscape.