Cybersecurity: mid-‘26 CISO conference call transcript covering budget trends and priorities + AI-impact

Research evidence excerpt

Cybersecurity: mid-‘26 CISO conference call transcript covering budget trends and priorities + AI-impact

28 July 2026

U.S. SMID-Cap Software

Cybersecurity: mid-'26 CISO conference call transcript covering

budget trends and priorities + AI-impact

We recently hosted a conference call with three CISOs discussing the latest budget trends, Peter Weed

+1 917 344 8390 AI-impact, and priorities. A full edited transcript is below and replay is here.

peter.weed@bernsteinsg.com

Cybersecurity spending continues to outpace broader IT spending, driven

Armin Hadavi, CFA primarily by AI. Security leaders consistently described AI as the biggest catalyst for new

+1 917 344 8463 investments, both because organizations must defend against AI-enabled attacks and armin.hadavi@bernsteinsg.com

because they need to securely enable internal AI adoption.

Luwei Yang

+1 917 344 8342 Identity has become the new security perimeter, and non-human identities are

luwei.yang@bernsteinsg.com now a top concern. The focus is shifting to securing AI agents (human-in-the-loop +

independent) — how to allocate identities for data / system / application access and apply

privileged access and governance frameworks that ensure least-privilege time constrained

access across both human and non-human actors.

Organizations are struggling to balance AI adoption with control and visibility.

Security leaders reported sharp increases in employee experimentation across multiple

LLMs leading to concerns around what data is being entered into models, what systems

agents can access, what actions they can perform, and how those actions are monitored

and audited. As a result, organizations are investing in AI governance through either

centralized AI routers or endpoint, network, and data-layer controls that provide visibility