AI in Cyberdefense: Opportunities and Risks for Asia/Pacific Enterprises

This IDC Perspective examines how AI is simultaneously transforming cyberdefense and accelerating adversary capabilities across Asia/Pacific. Although enterprises are increasingly embedding AI and generative (GenAI) into core security operations, such as threat detection, identity management, incident response, and security monitoring, adversaries are leveraging the same technologies to scale ransomware, impersonation, malware development, and business logic attacks at machine speed. As a result, Asia/Pacific (including Japan) (APJ) organizations are operating in a rapidly evolving threat environment in which traditional, human-centric security models are no longer sufficient.Based on IDC's 2025 Asia/Pacific Security Study, this research highlights that AI adoption in cybersecurity remains deliberate and tightly governed. Enterprises are prioritizing incremental, use-case-driven AI deployments, constrained by budget discipline, regulatory uncertainty, integration complexity, and concerns around AI transparency and trust. Despite these constraints, AI is already deeply embedded across existing security platforms, with planned expansion over the next 12 months toward more predictive, behavior-driven, and data-centric security use cases.The study further shows that APJ enterprises recognize the critical role of high-quality data, governance, and external expertise in scaling AI securely. Willingness to share anonymized security telemetry is high when privacy and control are assured, and reliance on managed security and advisory providers is increasing for AI trust, governance, and life-cycle management. Collectively, these findings indicate that AI in cyberdefense across APJ is moving from experimentation toward disciplined industrialization, anchored by data protection, regulatory alignment, and resilience-first security strategies."Across Asia/Pacific, AI is no longer a future differentiator in cybersecurity; it is already reshaping both defense and offense. What stands out is not rapid, unchecked adoption, but a disciplined approach in which enterprises are embedding AI into existing security platforms, prioritizing trust, data protection, and regulatory alignment over speed. As adversaries industrialize AI at machine scale, APJ organizations are responding by industrializing cyber-resilience, treating AI as an operational capability that must be governed, assured, and measurable rather than experimental," says Sakshi Grover, senior research manager, Cybersecurity Products and Services, IDC Asia/Pacific.