Dr. Stanislav Fort
Co-founder, chief scientist & CTO, at AISLE
AI Appreciation Day is a reminder of how far the technology has come in a remarkably short time. Having spent years building frontier AI models, I've seen that progress firsthand. But one lesson has become increasingly clear: raw model capability is only part of the story.
In cybersecurity, it's critical that we consider everything around the model. In doing so, we give it the right context, ground its reasoning, and design systems that security teams can trust when the stakes are highest. Frontier models will continue to improve, which is worth celebrating, but the next wave of innovation will come from the systems that reliably turn models' capabilities into positive security outcomes.
Tim Leehealey
Founder & Vice President, Strategy and Operations, at Strike48
I've been marvelling at what AI can do for years, but today, I'm most impressed by where it's delivering measurable impact.
In security operations, AI is moving beyond copilots and chat interfaces into day-to-day execution. We're seeing customers use AI to automatically resolve nearly 96% of their Level 1 security cases, handling tasks in under 30 seconds that previously took analysts more than 10+ minutes. In another deployment, agentic operations are projected to save a customer more than US$834,000 annually.
The value extends well beyond time and cost savings. Every repetitive task an AI agent takes on gives security teams more time to investigate complex threats, strengthen resilience, and stay ahead of attackers. AI delivers its greatest value when it handles the operational work that slows people down, allowing experienced professionals to focus on where their expertise makes the biggest difference.
Dale Hoak
CISO at RegScale
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the conversation around governance, risk, and compliance. Not by replacing people, but by eliminating the manual work that has slowed security and compliance teams for decades. For too long, organisations have relied on spreadsheets, screenshots, and point-in-time audits to answer questions that should be continuously validated. AI gives us the ability to move beyond documenting compliance and instead continuously measure, analyse, and verify it. That's a fundamental shift. Security teams can spend less time chasing evidence and more time reducing risk, while executives gain confidence that compliance reflects the organisation's current security posture rather than a snapshot from months ago.
The real value of AI isn't simply automation; it's acceleration with context. Modern organisations are deploying new applications, cloud services, and AI systems faster than governance teams can traditionally keep pace. AI can correlate evidence across security tools, identify control failures, recommend remediation, and surface emerging risks in minutes instead of weeks. When combined with automation and continuous controls monitoring, organizations can achieve a level of visibility that was previously impossible without dramatically increasing headcount. In an environment where cyber threats and regulatory expectations evolve daily, AI helps organisations move faster while making governance stronger, not weaker.
As AI continues to mature, the organisations that succeed won't be the ones using the most AI; they'll be the ones governing it the best. The future of compliance isn't about preparing for the next audit; it's about building continuous trust. AI is becoming the engine that transforms governance from a reactive, document-driven exercise into an intelligent, real-time capability that enables innovation while keeping risk under control. That's where the real appreciation for AI should be focused, not on the technology itself, but on its ability to help organisations confidently say "yes" to moving the business forward.
Henry Comfort
Co-founder & CEO of Geordie AI
AI Appreciation Day is a good reminder that the conversation has moved well beyond whether AI works. Through our customers, we've seen what AI agents can accomplish when organisations have the confidence to put them to work. They're accelerating workflows, taking repetitive tasks off people's plates, and helping teams move much faster than they could on their own.
That confidence doesn't come from the models themselves. It comes from understanding what AI agents can access, how they behave, and having the right governance in place to keep them operating safely. The organisations getting the most value from AI aren't necessarily using the most advanced models. They're the ones getting the controls in place that let their teams adopt AI agents with confidence. That's what I'm most excited to see as AI agents continue to mature over the next year.
Zak Menegazzi
APJ Director, Armis from ServiceNow
The agentic enterprise is, in many ways, a security nightmare. By connecting AI to every facet of the organisation, we are inadvertently creating a flat network. This runs counter to the principles of network segmentation and isolation that the security industry has advocated for decades. AI agents possess the autonomy to execute tasks but often lack the discernment to avoid harming their enterprise.
Organisations must implement guardrails to prevent AI-induced outages and data leaks, ensuring that agents do not become destructive simply because the logic dictates a path of least resistance.
Dr. Rebecca Hinds
Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean
The debate over whether AI will replace jobs is still too binary. The most immediate change is happening inside jobs, as AI takes over individual tasks and changes how people learn, contribute, and demonstrate their value.
48 per cent of Australian digital workers fear AI could eliminate their role, while 58 per cent say it has already automated meaningful work they would have preferred to keep. But the human work has not disappeared. Employees are still supplying the context, checking the outputs, correcting mistakes, and taking responsibility when AI gets something wrong.
The real risk is not simply that AI replaces people. It’s that organisations automate the parts of work through which people develop judgement, expertise and ownership, while leaving them with the clean-up. Leaders should stop asking how many roles AI can remove and start asking how work should be redesigned – what AI should do, what humans must continue to own, and how the productivity gains will be reinvested in people. Companies that use AI only as a headcount lever may cut costs in the short term, but they will also hollow out the skills and institutional knowledge they need to compete.
Rucha Sawant
Managing Director, Regional Practices Lead, Australia, at Avanade
This World AI Appreciation Day, the conversation has shifted from whether organisations should adopt AI to how they can scale agentic AI responsibly. AI agents are already beginning to reshape the way work gets done, but their success depends on more than deploying new technology. They need trusted data, strong governance, robust security and people with the confidence and skills to work alongside them. At Avanade, we're increasingly working with organisations that are moving beyond AI pilots and looking to embed agentic AI into everyday business processes in a way that is secure, scalable and delivers meaningful outcomes.
Accenture research shows only 25% of organisations feel equipped with the AI capabilities their workforce needs, while more than half are still determining their approach towards the transformation. As organisations embed AI into everyday operations, the ones making great progress will be those who will invest deliberately in trust, skills, change adoption and workforce readiness while simultaneously modernising their technology foundations.
That's why I believe the next chapter of AI transformation will move from being about productivity, algorithms and models to total enterprise reinvention.
On AI Appreciation Day, the key takeaway for business leaders is that success in the agentic era will be defined by those who build the culture, capability and confidence to scale it responsibly and turn possibility and innovation into sustained business value. And then the defining challenge becomes redesigning organisations where humans and agents can learn, decide and create value together.
Vini Cardoso
Chief Technology Officer, Cloudera, Australia & New Zealand
As AI moves into regulated and high-impact environments such as financial services, healthcare, utilities and the public sector, governance takes precedence for scaling.
Organisations need confidence in how AI systems operate, what data they rely on and where accountability sits. At the same time, rising cyber threats and growing regulatory scrutiny mean visibility and control over data, models, as well as infrastructure have become business imperatives rather than purely technical concerns.
Without that visibility, organisations face operational risks in addition to regulatory penalties, reputational damage and a loss of trust that can be difficult to recover.
Sujatha Iyer
Head of AI security at ManageEngine
AI has demonstrated the potential to transform the way organisations operate, but its success will ultimately be determined by trust. Businesses cannot simply layer AI onto fragmented systems and expect meaningful results. They need visibility into their data, robust security controls, accountable governance, and human oversight from the start.
When implemented responsibly, AI empowers people to make better decisions, improve operational resilience, and focus on higher-value work. Without those foundations, it risks amplifying existing challenges rather than solving them.
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David Hollingworth
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.