How CISOs Build Lasting Resilience in the AI Era

For CISOs, the only constant is continual transformation. Although our mandate is risk mitigation, it was often reactive in nature. In 2026, the CISO’s function as a strategic architect and business enabler is intensifying, with new requirements to secure AI initiatives and further drive digital resilience. The role has transcended mere cyber defense.

This evolution signals deeper organizational duties, involvement, and impact. For instance, a staggering 96% of CISOs are now responsible for AI governance and risk management, which requires us to shape policy, vet models, and ensure secure adoption. This shift is happening against a backdrop of escalating challenges like increasingly sophisticated threat actor capabilities, quantifying and communicating ROI to leadership, and addressing the cybersecurity burnout epidemic. It's an uphill climb, but CISOs are forging on.

To understand how they’re navigating this expanded scope, Splunk surveyed 650 global CISOs for The CISO Report: From Risk to Resilience in the AI Era. What we found was that the most impactful security leaders aren't just enduring; they’re innovating — leading their organizations into a future defined by intelligent, secure operations.

AI implementation: From productivity gains to privacy pains

AI is becoming a part of everyday business. But pressure from boards to implement the technology at breakneck speed runs counter to the CISO’s core mission. AI adoption is a top business priority CISOs are expected to champion, and a complex security challenge they are required to solve. But the biggest risk isn’t using AI; it’s being left out of the conversation. The business will implement AI, with or without the CISO’s involvement, so it's best that security leaders guide its safe and responsible rollout.

Our survey reveals that 40% of CISOs use generative AI in their security functions, while 39% are already exploring agentic AI. According to CISOs, AI significantly boosts productivity. Early adopters of agentic AI are seeing operational improvements, with 39% strongly agreeing it has increased reporting speeds. With alert volumes becoming unsustainable for many security teams, CISOs are leveraging AI to distinguish signal from noise, prioritize critical threats, and manage information more effectively.

However, CISOs are acutely aware of AI's pitfalls, with hallucination impacts, like missed alerts or false positives, as their greatest concern for agentic AI (83%), while 78% rank data leakage as their top concern for non-agentic AI. CISOs are already taking steps to mitigate these shortcomings, such as threat modeling the technology by security engineers to ensure safe deployment and creating dedicated security teams for AI agents (78%).

The CISO's security talent playbook for the AI era

Despite AI's transformative potential, CISOs make it abundantly clear that technology won’t replace human analysts — not only because CISOs will always require a “human-in-the-loop" for necessary oversight and control. Rather, they see AI as a co-pilot, freeing humans to focus on higher-order activities like threat hunting and strategic defense.

Successful CISOs know that technology alone isn't enough to keep organizations safe. The attackers we're now up against are much more sophisticated, finding new, creative means of exploitation. Security teams will need equally sophisticated and creative experts to mount their defenses. The nuanced, adaptive intelligence of a skilled workforce is irreplaceable.

This human-centric approach is critical, especially when addressing talent gaps in areas like threat hunting and engineering support. Our report shows that CISOs are prioritizing upskilling their current workforce and hiring new full-time employees over solely relying on technology investments to close these gaps. In fact, only 1% of CISOs view technology investments as a primary means of addressing talent shortages.

But CISOs also recognize immense strain on their teams. Forty-five percent sense moderate burnout among their employees, while another 20% would characterize it as significant. The culprits are familiar: high alert volumes (98%), false alerts (94%), and tool fatigue (79%). Addressing these stressors through better data management, automation, and contextualized alerting is essential for retaining the CISO’s most valuable asset — people — especially in a vast talent desert.

Cybersecurity: From cost center to business enabler

CISO collaboration across the C-suite is even more critical now as organizations apply AI to all aspects of the business. Therefore, it’s essential for CISOs to work directly with executive leaders to guide its safe deployment. Equally important, this collaboration is also critical for embedding security into all aspects of the business, helping connect the dots where the CISO holds accountability for security but lacks direct authority over other teams. That’s why bridging the cybersecurity knowledge gap within the C-suite (an obstacle for 85% of CISOs) is foundational for fostering greater resilience.

Data, presented with clear business context, becomes the common language that transforms technical nuances into business imperatives, allowing CISOs to build compelling narratives that showcase how security protects the bottom line, fuels innovation, and ensures alignment across the organization.

To this end, the days of security being viewed as a cost center are fading as CISOs increasingly reframe their function as a business enabler essential for growth. CISOs that expand their influence to shape strategy, manage technology, and oversee governance (particularly when it comes to AI) will squarely establish security as a core driver of business success.

Get the full CISO Report 2026 for more survey insights and recommendations on how you can become a resilient security leader for the AI era.