Demand for cybersecurity pros with AI skills is reaching a ‘fever pitch’

Cybersecurity may be AI’s next big jobs boom.

Box CEO Aaron Levie recently posted on X that AI for cybersecurity “is about to go vertical” as models become increasingly capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

That, he told Business Insider, could make cybersecurity “one of the hottest, if not the hottest, job categories.” As threats multiply, companies need systems that can prioritize alerts, investigate risk, recommend fixes, and automate remediation.

Humans, Levie said, will remain responsible for oversight and the highest-stakes decisions.

The CEO said he expects “massive” investments in the space, both in the technology itself and in the “expert operators” needed to make it effective. “You’re going to have so much more talent that gets pumped into this industry because of the amount of risks that are starting to be uncovered,” Levie said.

Levie isn’t the only one making this prediction.

Cybersecurity stocks are booming, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that roles like information security analysts, a central title in the field, will grow by 21% between 2025 and 2035.

It also ranks the role among the top 20 fastest-growing occupations in the timeframe.

Security leaders have warned for years that the threat landscape is worsening.

Over the past year, though, those concerns have become more real.

Anthropic has warned that its Mythos model could be used to identify and exploit software vulnerabilities.

In July, OpenAI’s models accessed internal datasets from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face.

Since then, doomsday warnings have intensified.

Most recently, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon sparked a viral debate when he resigned with claims that frontier labs are “gambling with our lives.” Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare’s chief security officer, told Business Insider via email that AI isn’t creating incremental changes to cybersecurity — it’s “putting it on a rocket ship.” Attack timelines that were once measured in days or hours, he said, can now unfold in seconds.

That leaves security teams with almost no room for manual response, making machine-speed defense the “baseline for survival.” That’s exactly where AI comes in: to save the day from AI.

Bourzikas said that the cybersecurity industry has faced a historic “talent shortage” due to a gap in specialized skills. “The war for engineers with deep AI and security expertise is at an absolute fever pitch,” Bourzikas wrote.

For years, he said, security teams were buried under a mountain of alerts, never having enough time, people, or resources to keep up.

That hasn’t eased up, but he said that AI gives space for companies to move from “firefighting to real risk mitigation.” AI agents could help close part of that gap by taking on repetitive tasks such as alert triage and data aggregation.

At Cloudflare, Bourzikas said his team deployed over 250 production agents in the last nine months to handle foundational security controls, freeing employees to focus on proactive defenses.

Similar to software engineers, the role of security professionals is shifting.

Protecting an enterprise now means securing model pipelines, data flows, and autonomous agents against risks such as prompt injection and data poisoning, Bourzikas said. “Security professionals must pivot from reading dashboards to architecting resilient, AI-native systems,” Bourzikas said.

Palmore, a former Google director who spent decades in the FBI, said AI is already changing roles built around heavy data review and analysis, like with security operations center analysts.

If AI can triage alerts, some entry-level work may be automated, he said, raising the bar for new cybersecurity hires to add judgment and come in with practical work experience.

Unlike Bourzikas, who expects cybersecurity worker headcount to keep growing, Palmore expects fewer people may ultimately be needed — and that they’ll be expected to have a different, more advanced skillset from the get-go.

Additionally, he said staying up-to-date with the latest advancements will be even more critical. “You have some stuff that you’re going to need to learn and stay on top of in order to remain relevant,” said Palmore, who founded risk firm Apogee Global RMS.