GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) can be a powerful business tool. Adopting this technology enables you to automate repetitive tasks, letting your staff focus on more revenue-driven activities. GenAI facilitates your company’s fast and personalized responses to customer inquiries and ensures data-driven business decisions. 

While GenAI has become increasingly popular in business, its adoption comes with a certain level of risk. Understanding the threats of adopting GenAI in your company and the necessary preventive measures can help safeguard your business. Discussed below are four genAI risks for businesses.

1. Privacy and data security

GenAI solutions usually need access to significant data amounts to train and generate diverse, top-quality output. The data might contain confidential or sensitive details that may be leaked, exposed, stolen, or misused by malicious actors. While ensuring the security and privacy of the data used to train and engage with these genAI tools isn’t easy, implementing the right data protection tactics can be helpful. With AI security posture management solutions, you can boost data security and privacy by:

• Swiftly and correctly identifying privacy and data security risks
• Analyzing data context and content to facilitate decision-making
• Remediating risks before malicious actors can exploit them

This prioritizes transparency regarding data access, usage, and storage so businesses can evaluate their data security and privacy to spot vulnerabilities and institute measures to reduce risk efficiently.

2. Fraud and identity risks

GenAI presents fraud risks via:

• Synthetic identity fraud: It involves using AI to generate fake biometric data and fabricate identification documents, allowing fraudsters to establish counterfeit identities for financial crimes   
• Sophisticated AI-generated content: Fraudsters use AI tools to generate social engineering attacks and phishing emails to launch sophisticated attacks, such as impersonating customer care representatives to acquire sensitive data from victims
• Deepfakes: They’re a powerful identity theft tool whose risks include manipulation of facial recognition systems and fraudsters making fake documents

Machine learning methods, including behavioral biometrics, risk scoring, and more, can be used for real-time transaction tracking and fraud prevention. They can help:

• Catch unusual patterns
• Analyze the possibility of fraud
• Unearth fraudulent actor networks
• Analyze customer behaviors and transaction patterns

3. Misinformation

GenAI tools can create video, audio, or text content that seems credible, but it isn’t. Since these solutions are trained to use large language models (LLMs), they can generate convincing content based on predictions instead of facts. The use of genAI in business increases the possibility of hallucinations, which arise when these tools misrepresent information due to inadequate training data. These hallucinations pose a major threat to businesses depending on GenAI tools for content creation, decision-making, or research.

When misleading or false data is presented as facts and employees or clients act on it unknowingly, it can result in legal liabilities and reputational damage. Implementing guardrails can help ensure AI-generated content remains within acceptable limits. You can also have humans review the content for coherence and accuracy and make relevant corrections.

4. Enhanced attack efficiency

Cybercriminals are now leveraging GenAI technologies to automate and scale their attacks. AI-enabled cyberattacks utilize AI to automate and improve traditional cyberattack capabilities, making them more targeted, sophisticated, and hard to detect. Implementing posture management and AI-powered anomaly detection systems can help safeguard against AI-driven cyberattacks.

Endnote

While adopting GenAI in business can be rewarding, it comes with a certain level of risk. Familiarizing yourself with GenAI risks, including privacy and data security, misinformation, fraud and identity theft, and more, can help you take proactive measures to safeguard your business.