Google Cloud’s annual Cybersecurity Forecast, authored by Francis deSouza and contributors from the Google Threat Intelligence Group, Mandiant, and the Office of the CISO, frames 2026 as the year AI fundamentally reshapes both offense and defense. The report identifies two defining shifts: the rise of agentic security automation, where AI agents take over alert triage, anomaly detection, and response workflows so analysts can focus on judgment-heavy decisions; and the urgent need for organisation-wide AI fluency, since attackers will increasingly target employees with AI-driven phishing, vishing, and deepfakes. The headline message for boards is that operational resilience against machine-speed attacks is no longer optional — it is now expected.
On the threat side, Google predicts the first sustained, fully automated campaigns in which adversaries use agentic AI to discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster than defenders can patch them. Identity and access management is flagged as the dominant initial access vector, made worse by hybrid and multicloud sprawl and the rapid spread of “shadow agents” — AI agents deployed by employees without governance. Ransomware, data theft, and extortion remain the most financially damaging category of cybercrime, with attackers shifting focus to third-party providers, virtualisation layers, and even public blockchains to make their infrastructure harder to take down. Nation-state activity from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is expected to continue at high intensity, with critical infrastructure as a persistent target.
For European organisations, the report highlights two themes especially relevant to public-sector and critical-infrastructure customers: sovereign cloud is set to become a steady drumbeat across the EU as member states reduce dependence on U.S. providers, and regulators in finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure will define AI-specific resilience obligations. CISOs are urged to treat AI resilience as a core security pillar — building AI resilience architecture, continuous AI health monitoring, and integrating AI into incident response and business continuity. The practical takeaway: cybersecurity basics (authentication, authorisation, monitoring, least-privilege identity for both humans and agents) matter more than ever, precisely because AI accelerates the consequences of getting them wrong.