In July 2026 Rajiv Shah was part of an industry panel at the Australian AI Safety Forum discussing safe and responsible adoption of AI. In particular, he advocated for the role of the cybersecurity profession in AI safety, including the following:
– Cyber security is not about saying no to using AI systems, but finding a way to use them safely and to manage the risks associated with such use. What happens if you say no all the time is people probably go around you and set up all these shadow IT systems – or if you lock your system down your organisation gets left behind
– Successful AI adoption is about having a very clear, shared view of what problem you are trying to solve, and keeping this at the front of mind throughout the design and implementation of the solution. If everyone’s got a different idea about why they’re doing something, then you very rarely get a successful outcome
– AI security is not just about the confidentiality and privacy of data (although they are important), it’s also about ensuring the availability of your business systems if they depend on AI. If you build your systems where they become critically dependent on this AI platform, what are you doing to ensure the availability of that platform, and what is your fallback plan when that platform goes out of service or has an outage?
– Success in adoption requires the cyber security profession at the heart of enabling AI transformation. Safety and innovation are not an either/or choice – they’re actually things that work together, since by building safely we enable the innovation. Cyber security professionals have been thinking about things like data security and risk management for many years, so they need to be in the conversations from the outset.
You can watch the full discussion on Youtube or below, and check out all the recording from the event at the AI Safety Forum website.