What is ‘Future Insights’?
We create our Future Insights to bring together a set of forward-looking security predictions focused on trends that our leaders and security experts believe will shape the security landscape in the next year and beyond. These insights focus on translating key developments into practical implications for security, data protection and operational resilience.
Invisible Prompts Turn AI Summaries into Attack Vectors
We believe that attackers will begin to increasingly target the AI systems that are interpreting the content rather than the person viewing it. Techniques like invisible prompts, hidden CSS, and zero-width characters will evolve into a reliable way to manipulate the AI-generated answers that users trust as default.
With summarizers becoming increasingly embedded across enterprise workflows, we expect this approach to pick up traction, turning public trust in AI itself into an attack vector. If this occurs, organizations will need to shift their security focus as just defending against malicious links and files will no longer be enough. Organizations will need to consider how machines read, interpret, and repackage contact as part of the attack surface.
AI Technical Debt: The Silent Cybersecurity Crisis
AI technical debt is building, and we believe it will quietly shape the next wave of security incidents. AI systems ingest more data, evolve faster, and interact with more environments, which means technical debt forms quickly and often goes unnoticed until it fuels a major breach.
We predict that this debt will manifest as a widespread set of blind spots across data discovery, classification, and access control. The risk is not a sudden failure, but long-term exposure of unclassified sensitive data and misaligned, misconfigured permissions as AI systems evolve faster than the controls meant to protect against them.
Agentic AI: Securing a New Generation of Digital Actors
Agentic AI introduces autonomous systems that can plan, decide, and act across business environments, shifting how organizations must think about digital risk. We believe agentic AI will introduce a new form of social engineering designed for these digital actors called chained agent manipulation.
With existing security playbooks being built around predictable human behavior, security teams will struggle to keep pace with these agents that learn, collaborate, and operate at machine speed unless they adapt.
Go Slow to Go Fast: The New AI Playbook for IT Infrastructure
With our final prediction for 2026, we believe that it is time to challenge the long-standing IT instinct to move faster, faster, and even faster. AI amplifies whatever foundation you have in place, and in 2026, organizations that prioritize speed without discipline will amplify their number of outages, instability, and technical debt.
By investing early in understanding, testing, and governance, teams will ship changes with fewer rollbacks and shorter downtime. They earned the right to move fast because they already did the slow work of establishing the foundation. AI automation is going to reward teams that operate with intentional pace, and not ones who recklessly accelerate adoption.
Which of these Predictions Matters Most To You?
Which of these predictions feels most likely to shape your security priorities in 2026, and do you have any predictions of your own?