Financial transformation powered by artificial intelligence now runs as two races at once. Banks and other financial institutions are racing to turn data into action with AI, while their security teams scramble to prepare for a wave of agentic AI-driven threats.

That second race is being shaped by how cheaply attackers can now obtain advanced capabilities. Agentic AI hasn’t erased the old hierarchy of hacktivists, criminal gangs and nation-states, but it has handed lower-tier actors tools once reserved for the top, according to John Scimone (pictured), president and chief security officer of Dell Technologies Inc.

“I think the pyramid still exists, but undoubtedly the cost of entry and the barriers to entry have crumbled,” Scimone said. “Said another way, the least sophisticated attack tomorrow is more sophisticated than the world will have ever seen a year ago.”

Scimone spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante at the Dell Technologies New York Symposium, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed financial transformation and using AI to defend against AI threats. (* Disclosure below.)

Securing financial transformation in the agentic era

Dell is already putting frontier models to work on its own defenses. The company is a partner in Anthropic PBC’s Project Glasswing, which gives vetted organizations access to powerful AI tools to secure critical systems, Scimone noted. The program has drawn in new members and was recently folded into a broader verification program. The fundamentals of identity, access management and detection still apply, but attacks now arrive at a speed and scale that make yesterday’s practices insufficient, he explained.

“We as cybersecurity professionals are going to have to use AI to defend against AI,” Scimone said. “There’s a huge opportunity really to be able to leverage this capability for good.”

That opportunity could matter most to organizations that have never been able to staff a full security team. Agents can deliver scale and expertise that smaller companies could never hire or build on their own, according to Scimone.

“Our future security program might be a security program of one person, but it might have 10,000 agents, all of which are the best security practitioners in the space and the roles in which they’re assigned,” Scimone added.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies New York Symposium:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Dell Technologies New York Symposium. Neither Dell, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE