Bob Fabien Zinga argues vendors are rebranding basic machine-learning tools as AI to inflate valuations. He warns that overhyped expectations damage security outcomes and calls for honest budgeting and grounded leadership instead of chasing AI promises.
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in the enterprise can trust you, all of the other business leaders and senior management. So don't overhype things. Like right now, I think AI is completely overhyped. It doesn't make sense. But eventually, I think what we think AI can do is going to be able to do in time, but we are not there right now. And of course, every vendor's not— anything they did, like even back in the day, we used to do heuristic, right, with some some of the security thing. Now everything is just labeled AI. So much machine learning, now it's AI. Like everything they can think of, AI, AI, just because they can sell it. And some companies now are evaluated way above their actual value. They don't even bring any money just because it's AI. Oh, look, look at that. It is worth more than a billion dollars when in reality it's not even worth $100 million. So we really need to stop doing that because in the long term, that's not going to help us, right? We need to stay grounded, but we need to be frank and work with our teams and management to get the budget that we need in order to do the jobs that we can do. I think that's really where it comes down to.
You know, it's a great point. And I want to come back to the value of specifically leadership in cybersecurity, right? Leadership tends to have a much greater value in situations where you're dealing with chaos or unpredictability, ambiguity, intelligent adversaries, and so forth. And cybersecurity seems to fit that bill because we do have those things that we have to deal with. We've got people and technology and processes and adversaries. But if we look at the adversaries, and I kind of want your viewpoint here,
