Five Practical Steps to Strengthen Trust in Agentic AI Across UAE Organizations
DUBAI — As organisations in the UAE race to adopt advanced computing tools that promise significant gains in productivity and innovation, they are simultaneously grappling with a widening “trust gap” that threatens to undermine the technology’s potential.
Without foundational reliability, both employees and customers are less likely to utilise these tools to their full potential. As Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer, recently noted: “The ability to delegate a task in a trusted form is going to be the difference between being a market leader versus being bankrupt.”
Five Critical Steps to Build Trust
Cisco has identified five essential strategies for organisations navigating an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape:
1. Establish the fundamentals
Attackers often target low-hanging fruit. Organisations must ensure basic security controls are upgraded, including phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, strong identity verification, least-privilege access — including for digital assistants — and Zero Trust architectures. Patching, asset visibility, and configuration management are equally essential.
2. Upgrade your infrastructure
Structural vulnerabilities are a risk companies cannot afford. End‑of‑life systems that cannot be patched, upgraded, or supported must be replaced. Modern platforms should include advanced protections such as memory safety mechanisms and exploit mitigations, designed to remain flexible enough to address future threats.
3. Defend at machine speed
The human mind cannot comprehend the scale, adaptability, and speed of today’s threats, making automation a necessity. Organisations must invest in machine‑speed detection, automated triage and containment, and the continuous monitoring of identity and data activity.
4. Embed your defences
Analysing an attack after the fact is no longer sufficient. Defences must be embedded directly within the workload, device, and traffic path. Implementing in‑line enforcement mechanisms, runtime protections, and updateable exploit shields allows security controls to act in real time.
5. Unleash your own tools
The best defence against attackers who use advanced computing is using the same technology for defence. Security teams must use these tools for threat hunting, conformance testing, digital twins, and validation. With digital assistants acting as virtual team members, organisations can compress deployment cycles from months to days.
Securing the Future
As the UAE continues its journey toward a digital‑first economy, the businesses that prioritise these security foundations will be the best positioned to harness the full potential of next‑generation computing tools. Trust cannot be treated as a feature layered on as an afterthought; it must be woven into the very fabric of an organisation’s infrastructure, ensuring that the pursuit of innovation remains both protected and sustainable.
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