6 Ways to Harness AI Security Without Compromising Control

AI is rapidly changing, and the pressure on IT leaders to move fast and stay ahead has never been greater. But while AI promises to unlock powerful innovation and empower teams, it arrives amidst growing regulatory complexity and serious compliance challenges. This creates the core conflict for the modern IT function: how do you balance the speed of adoption with ironclad control? 

Data from the latest Salesforce State of IT Security Report shows this challenge is top-of-mind, with 71% of organisations in Australia and New Zealand planning to increase security budgets. The real work, however, isn’t just about spending – it’s about leveraging AI as a force multiplier for security, by building strong governance foundations that instil trust, enhance compliance, and preserve security.

Let’s dive into the 6 ways IT leaders can harness AI without compromising control.

1. Set the Guardrails Before You Scale

Governance for large language models (LLMs) and AI agents has already emerged as a key strategic focus for organisations. However, globally 55% of security leaders are not fully confident they can deploy AI agents with the right guardrails, while 53% are not fully confident about compliance, according to the State of IT Security Report. The solution isn’t just policy – it’s structure.

As organisations adopt AI across diverse functions, formalising oversight is essential to ensure its responsible, secure, and effective use.. This means evolving governance to include Responsible AI principles such as Fairness, Transparency, and Accountability in the foundation. Strong governance frameworks are essential to mitigate risk, unlock potential, and define acceptable use policies for LLMs. This proactive approach ensures that robust guardrails are established for data lineage, bias detection, and oversight before AI initiatives scale.

2. Bake Security Into Every Innovation

The latest Salesforce State of IT: Security report shows that organisations leading in innovation share one common foundation — strong, embedded security. Rather than treating security as a layer added after deployment, forward-thinking teams integrate it from the start.To bridge the critical intersection of trust between customers and companies, IT leaders must adopt a Security-by-Design approach. This principle proactively embeds controls into every phase of the development lifecycle to counter early system vulnerabilities. Transparency from IT and security teams about their practices and systems when embedding security into LLM-powered solutions is therefore vital.

This approach not only safeguards data and compliance but also accelerates innovation by enabling confident experimentation with AI and automation. When security is baked into every stage of development, it becomes more than protection — it’s the engine of trust, resilience, and growth.

3. Automate to Unlock Capacity

With AI and automation reshaping IT operations, leaders are rethinking how their teams can do more with less. According to the State of IT: Security Report: 68% of IT leaders say their workloads have grown more complex, while many are still navigating new expectations around AI governance and security.

The challenge? Balancing innovation with operational efficiency.

The opportunity lies in automation. From streamlining documentation and reporting to orchestrating workflows across systems, AI-powered tools are helping teams reclaim time and reduce friction. Intelligent agents are also beginning to play a bigger role,  proactively monitoring for unusual activity, coordinating incident responses, and ensuring systems stay aligned with evolving standards.

By offloading repetitive, manual work, IT teams can focus on what truly drives innovation, building resilient, secure, and future-ready systems.

4. Gain Full Visibility Across Clouds

Organisations face a range of rapidly evolving and increasingly sophisticated security threats. Among the top concerns are ransomware, phishing, data poisoning and cloud breaches, according to the State of IT Security Report. 

As attacks grow more complex, security teams are turning to AI-driven capabilities to strengthen detection and response. AI-powered monitoring across hybrid and multi-cloud environments helps close visibility gaps and enables faster, more controlled incident response. Meanwhile, LLM-based anomaly detection empowers AI agents to identify subtle irregularities in data at scale — enhancing both security and compliance with greater precision and efficiency.  

5. Protect People as Much as Systems

According to the State of IT Security Report, 80% of leaders believe that AI agents will introduce new security opportunities. One of the most exciting innovations is AI’s ability to reduce alert fatigue and free up highly valuable human capacity. AI agents also assist with threat detection, patching, and compliance automation.

These efficiencies mean leaders can view AI agents as the ultimate force multipliers, effectively freeing highly skilled security professionals from rote and repetitive tasks to focus on the high-value, strategic challenges that truly safeguard the business and drive innovative growth.

The path forward is clear: AI is not just a technology to be secured; it is the ultimate tool for securing the enterprise itself. While this new era brings necessary concerns around data privacy and bias, the solution is not to slow down, but to accelerate the adoption of comprehensive AI governance, proactive risk management, and transparent AI processes. The speed of AI requires the control of AI.

6. Keep Human in the Loop for Sensitive Actions 

AI agents are reshaping how security teams operate, but human judgment continues to play a defining role in moments of risk and uncertainty. Embedding a human-in-the-loop model allows AI systems to escalate complex or business-critical decisions to experts—striking the right balance between automation, governance, and trust. According to Arctic Wolf and Sapio Research, over two-thirds of cybersecurity leaders agree that substantial human input remains essential for safe and responsible AI adoption.

Ready to build the security foundations that enable confident AI innovation? Download the State of IT Security Report to learn more about how AI innovation and security go hand-in-hand.