Artificial Intelligence and OT Cybersecurity
Participating in the 6th annual OT Cybersecurity Conference in Athens, hosted by INTEC in collaboration with Honeywell, was a valuable opportunity to exchange views with cybersecurity leaders, industrial experts, and critical infrastructure stakeholders on one of the most important questions facing our sector, on how do we build real resilience in an increasingly complex threat landscape, and combine AI and OT security.
In the panel I participated, we focused on the role of AI in OT cybersecurity. Not as a distant concept, but as an immediate force multiplier for both attackers and defenders. AI can accelerate phishing, reconnaissance, targeting, and adversarial playbooks. At the same time, it can help defenders detect weak signals across industrial environments. Abnormal traffic, unusual vendor access, configuration drift, process deviations, and early indicators of compromise.
The key message is that AI will not magically solve OT cybersecurity. It will amplify what already exists. If an organization lacks asset visibility, segmentation, governance, vendor access control, or tested incident response, AI will not compensate for those weaknesses. It may simply automate confusion and create false confidence.
In OT, cybersecurity is not only about data protection. It is about safety, uptime, environmental impact, equipment integrity, and public trust. That is why AI adoption in industrial environments must be governed with discipline, accountability, explainability, auditability, human oversight, and clear recovery plans.
The organizations that will benefit most from AI will not necessarily be the fastest adopters. They will be the ones that combine innovation with strong cyber fundamentals, operational discipline, and executive ownership, especially when it comes to AI and OT security.
A strong reminder from the discussion: resilience is not built through technology alone. It is built through visibility, governance, preparation, and the ability to make informed decisions under pressure.
