The conversation about AI in cybersecurity is missing the point. While the industry has been focused on the emergence of AI-generated phishing emails, perhaps a far more profound shift has been somewhat ignored.
Your workforce is no longer just human. It’s a hybrid team of people, AI agents, copilots, assistants and digital partners.
This creates a new and complex attack surface. The next great security challenge isn’t just protecting a human from a machine. It is about securing the relationship between them.
This isn’t a future threat; it’s happening now.
The Real Threat: Socially Engineering the Human-AI Alliance
For years, attackers have focused on the few seconds it takes for a human to click a malicious link. Their next target is the trust between a user and their AI. The new attack vectors will be more subtle and far more dangerous. This includes tactics such as:
- Prompt Injection: Tricking a user into feeding a malicious prompt to their AI agent, causing it to exfiltrate data or perform unauthorized actions.
- Data Poisoning: Socially engineering an employee to provide a “helpful” but tainted dataset to their AI, compromising its future outputs.
- Confidence Exploitation: Using an AI’s authoritative tone to convince a user to bypass security controls they otherwise wouldn’t.
These are not technology problems; they are human problems, amplified by technology. Solving them requires an understanding of human behavior, psychology and risk. It requires a platform built, not just to stop a bad link, but to manage the human variable in its entirety.
HRM Built for the Future
While others are scrambling to adapt, KnowBe4’s human risk management (HRM) platform was built for this challenge. KnowBe4’s strategy has always been about more than just training, it’s a continuous, data-driven system for managing human behavior. Here’s how our platform is already protecting your new hybrid workforce, mapped to our DEEP (Defend, Educate, Empower, Protect) framework.
DEFEND: Protecting the New Perimeter
The “perimeter” is now the conversation between your user and their AI. Our advanced AI-powered anti-phishing tool (Defend) is designed to understand context and intent, not just signatures. It detects the sophisticated, payload-less social engineering attacks that are the precursors to a human-AI compromise, providing a critical first line of defense.
This isn’t just about protecting the user; it’s about creating a sanitized information environment for the AI agent itself. By filtering out malicious precursors, we protect the agent from being fed poisoned data or weaponized prompts from the start.
EDUCATE: Building Critical Thinkers, Not Just Click-Spotters
The only way to defend against new threats is to build a workforce of critical thinkers. This has been our core mission for over 15 years.
KnowBe4’s 2025 Phishing by Industry Benchmark Report, analyzing over 67 million simulations, proves our methodology works. We take organizations from an average baseline Phish-prone Percentage of 33.1% down to just 4.1% within a year—an 86% improvement. This isn’t just about spotting a phish, it’s about fundamentally changing security behavior.
Additionally, SecurityCoach integrates into an organization’s existing security stack. It detects risky behaviors like a user attempting to upload sensitive data to a public AI tool or using insecure prompting techniques that could be exploited. It then delivers an immediate, contextual “SecurityTip” that coaches users on data handling and safe interaction with AI. It reinforces the training at the exact point of risk, ensuring the lessons learned are applied in the real world.
EMPOWER: Building a Culture That Questions Everything
Empowerment is the cultural bedrock of a resilient organization. For decades, we’ve trained employees to comply with requests from authority, whether it’s their CEO or a system prompt. Now, we are giving them AI assistants that speak with unequalled authority, presenting information as infallible fact. If an organization’s culture punishes people for questioning the CEO, they may never feel safe questioning the AI.
This is why the most critical human defense is a culture where employees are not just allowed, but encouraged, to pause and question any request that feels suspicious, regardless of the source.
It is also the reason why the Phish Alert Button (PAB) is one of the most critical empowerment tools in existence. It’s more than a reporting feature; it’s a safe, non-confrontational channel for an employee to say, “I’m not sure about this.” It gives them a tool to act on their intuition without fear of looking silly or being insubordinate. By providing this simple, powerful tool, organizations build the cultural muscle of respectful inquiry, which is the ultimate defense against sophisticated social engineering, whether it comes from a person or a machine.
PROTECT: Turning Humans and AI into a Resilient System
A mature strategy acknowledges a simple truth that mistakes will inevitably happen. Even with the best defenses and the most well-trained workforce, a moment of distraction can lead to an error. The Protect pillar is about building an intelligent safety net to ensure that when these inevitable mistakes occur, their blast radius is contained instantly. It’s about resilience, not blame.
Consider the simple, common mistake of sending an email with sensitive data to the wrong person. This isn’t a malicious act; it’s a human error. This is where KnowBe4 Prevent acts as a critical safety net. It uses contextual machine learning to understand the content and recipients of an email at the point of sending. If it detects a potential error, like an unusual recipient for sensitive financial data, it doesn’t just block the email. It prompts the user in real-time, turning a potential data breach into a teachable moment.
PhishER Plus provides the second half of the safety net. All it takes is a single user to report a phishing email for an automated incident response workflow to kickoff. It uses AI to instantly triage the threat, analyze its components and can automatically “rip” it from every other inbox in the organization in minutes. This transforms one person’s vigilance into an automated, enterprise-wide protective action, turning a potential crisis into a non-event.
The future of security isn’t about building higher walls around technology, it’s about understanding, managing and securing the complex and powerful relationship between people and their AI counterparts. We have the data, the framework and the platform to lead this charge. We are not just protecting your people; we are securing the future of your workforce.
The natural next step in this evolution is AI agents that can recognize and respond to suspicious prompts, something that will require the same foundation of human risk data and behavioral understanding. The time to act is now because the real battleground of cybersecurity is no longer human versus machine, but human with machine.
