Generative AI speeds up processes and decisions, but it also shortens the time to react when something goes wrong. According to Absolute Security, the focus of enterprise security is shifting from perfect prevention to the ability to withstand an attack or outage.
Generative AI promises a new level of productivity, but speed has a price: the faster processes run and the more tightly systems are linked, the less time remains to contain a disruption. Companies must therefore ask not only how to prevent every incident, but how to stay operational when prevention fails.
Companies are automating processes, accelerating decisions and completing tasks at a pace that was barely conceivable a few years ago. Behind these gains, however, a second development is taking shape that has received less attention: AI changes not only how fast organisations work, but the conditions under which they function, writes Thomas Lo Coco, Sales Manager Central Europe at Absolute Security.
For decades, large organisations relied on a degree of friction. Decisions took time, processes had manual checkpoints, and several intermediate steps often lay between an error and its consequences. These delays were inefficient, but they also acted as a buffer. AI reduces that buffer.
More speed, less time to react
McKinsey estimates that generative AI could create economic value of up to 4.4 trillion US dollars a year, a significant share of it through automated knowledge work and faster workflows. The same acceleration alters the risk landscape. When decisions are made faster, processes are automated and systems are increasingly connected autonomously, there is less time to spot and correct errors. According to Lo Coco, this does not necessarily make each individual error more likely, but its effects can spread faster and grow larger.
From IT systems to ecosystems
Complexity grows in parallel. A single workflow can span endpoints, cloud services, identity platforms, external service providers and AI-based applications, turning the enterprise into an ecosystem of interdependent components. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report likewise links technological change with systemic risk, and in Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, third parties were involved in around 30 percent of the breaches examined. Security therefore no longer depends solely on individual systems, but on the entire structure of systems, partners and processes.
The shrinking window
For security teams, the gap between a vulnerability and its business impact is narrowing. A compromised identity, a manipulated endpoint or a failed cloud service does not necessarily remain confined to the affected system. IBM puts the average cost of a data breach at almost five million US dollars, yet direct costs are only part of the picture. Increasingly, what matters is how fast an incident spreads and how long operations stay impaired. An IT outage is no longer just a technical problem: when digital systems form the operational backbone, it becomes a business event with possible consequences for revenue, customer relationships, supply chains and reputation.
Prevention alone is no longer enough
The classic answer consists of firewalls, endpoint security, access controls, monitoring and alerts. These measures remain indispensable, but in a highly automated and networked environment they meet a fundamental limit: not every incident can be prevented, and the more complex a system becomes, the harder it is to anticipate every failure and attack path. The central question therefore shifts from “How do we prevent every incident?” to “How does the company stay able to act when prevention fails?” This is where digital resilience gains weight.
Resilience down to the firmware
Resilience, Lo Coco argues, means more than a quick recovery. A resilient company must maintain critical functions under adverse conditions, preserve the integrity of its systems and return to a secure state in a controlled and timely manner. This matters especially for endpoints. Laptops and smartphones now operate in home offices, on the road, offline or in networks the company does not control, yet often sit at the heart of business-critical processes. A security mechanism that works only inside the operating system can reach its limits if that very layer has been compromised.
Absolute Security presents its own technology as an answer. According to the company, Absolute Persistence is anchored in device firmware, survives below the operating system and keeps security functions running even if software has been tampered with or removed. Through partnerships with device manufacturers, the company says it is embedded in the firmware of 600 million endpoints. This is meant to give organisations visibility and control over compromised or hard-to-reach devices and to let them manage recovery centrally.
Resilience as the next competitive edge
Productivity alone, Lo Coco concludes, will no longer be a sufficient competitive advantage in an increasingly automated economy. The decisive capability of the coming years may lie less in how quickly a company deploys AI than in how stable it remains under the pressure of that speed. The winners of the next phase of digitalisation will probably not be only those with the most powerful AI systems, but those that combine speed with control and productivity with resilience. In an economy where processes run ever faster, time itself becomes a risk factor.
Carolina Heyder is a business analyst and moderator with extensive experience in the German and international IT market. She has worked for many years at renowned European trade publishers such as WEKA Fachmedien, Vogel IT Medien, Springer, and Aspencore. She creates content for both web and print media and is an expert in front of the microphone and camera. Thanks to her fluency in German, English, and Spanish, as well as her Chilean roots, she brings a global and intercultural perspective to topics such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, sustainability, and other key areas of the IT sector.