3 trends shaping the future of cyber leadership

The Global Cooperation Barometer, released in January, gave a stark warning to global cyber leaders. Significant macro trends are impacting their ability to act as effective stewards of building digital resilience.

The report outlined how a wave of geopolitical, economic and technological upheaval has left peace and security cooperation falling for seven consecutive years.

This sets a challenging context for the global cyber leadership community when more, not less, international cooperation is needed – from interoperable global security standards to protecting cross-border data flows and collectively securing shared systemic infrastructures.

Recent geopolitical tensions and domestic trade pressures have upset the current global cybersecurity alliances, funding for cyber and federal agencies and commitments to international law-enforcement cooperation.

Cyber resilience is unlike traditional security domains. Shifting political dynamics are more difficult to unpick when the digital and physical continue to converge and there are seemingly ever-increasing global supply interdependencies.

Even then, geopolitics and a shifting domestic agenda are one of three major strategic macro trends, alongside transformative technology and key demographic shifts, that could shape the future of the cyber leadership agenda for years to come.

The 2024 year of elections saw Donald Trump enter the White House. It also signalled the start of more mandates worldwide for more inward approaches to trade and the economy.

It follows that geopolitical tensions will arise, creating a more uncertain macro-environment.

As outlined in the World Economic Forum Global Cybersecurity Outlook, “geopolitics” is the number one challenge facing the cyber community, given it leads to state-sponsored attacks, data sovereignty conflicts and hinders cooperation.

Amid the early days of the new US administration, geopolitics has already manifested in the domestic cyber domain. It shows a potential cyber blueprint others will follow globally, with cyber policy set to change on several fronts.

Firstly, regarding international cooperation, cyber capacity-building efforts will be curtailed, and the cyberspace and technology supply chains will see further division.

A push to diversify suppliers, reshoring production and strengthening local infrastructure, will continue at pace.

Secondly, an expected retreat on regulatory and governance measures, such as relieving pressure on the technology giants, software liability and pausing minimum industry standards, will cascade across the ecosystem.

Finally, adopting a “peace through strength” foreign policy could inadvertently exacerbate existing conflicts and contribute to more instability in the cyber domain.

The rapid adoption of frontier technologies contributes to new vulnerabilities and threats but at a much faster pace than many envisaged.

We are at the “crunch time for AI,” according to the Economist, following the hundreds of billions of global investment in AI that followed the release of ChatGPT a little over two years ago. As outlined in the Forum’s new AI and Cyber Report, cyber leaders have to contend with the realities of three-quarters of all major enterprises now having an active AI strategy.

Challenges are inherent in securing complex applications and their transformative business processes but the release of the DeepSeek app only highlighted again how aggressive the timelines are for the new tools, security principles and necessary capabilities.

Cyber leaders must also move beyond traditional information security practices to ensure fairness, adversarial robustness and explainability, which underpin the trust that the C-suite now demands of their AI investments.

At an ecosystem level, as the CEO of Cloudflare outlined at the 2025 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, AI-driven cyber resilience is potentially game-changing for attacker-defender dynamics.

However, unlocking game-changing cyber defence will be driven by access to relevant proprietary data at a scale that inherently favours larger hyper-scalers and end-to-end cyber providers.

This principle is a key driver behind recent record stock prices and market consolidation towards a few major cyber platform providers. Cyber leaders should be aware of the potential implications of concentration and dependencies that could lead to systemic impact, accelerate cyber inequity or sit at odds with some countries’ “sovereign” aspirations.

The Global Cooperation Barometer highlights how growing global supply chain complexity makes risks harder to predict, just as millennials and Generation Z become the majority of the global workforce.

The past decade has focused on securing enterprise networks in traditional industries such as banking, manufacturing and healthcare. Now, hundreds of millions of digitally native consumers and workers interact with many decentralized, cloud and edge infrastructures in newer nascent industries in their cyber journey.

Consequently, cyber leaders will need to address new points of risk.

Cybercriminals are already riding this trend. The online gaming industry alone now sees half of all global DDoS attacks. An epidemic of direct hacking of global cryptocurrency exchanges has resulted in another year exceeding billions of dollars in losses.

The International Monetary Fund and US Federal Agencies have identified it as an emergent systemic risk that requires urgent global action to better protect what has become an industry with a market capitalization akin to India’s gross domestic product.

Web 3 technologies and platforms are no longer marginal in the global economy. Interactive media entertainment is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars – even NVIDIA started as a gaming graphics card company.

More millennials own cryptocurrency than real estate before accounting for other frontier platforms such as the metaverse, virtual reality or newer applications used by hundreds of millions of people under 35 but with limited or fully adopted cyber frameworks or consistently accepted cyber governance.

At times of global tension, economic headwinds and rapid technology adoption, more rather than less dialogue is needed.

The cyber resilience in industries community is in a trusted and unique position. It can be central to ensuring a multistakeholder and global pathway can be found for a prosperous, resilient digital future even amidst a complex risk landscape.

They can identify what is critical and imperative to the ecosystem despite heightened tension between the major powers, especially regarding international capacity building and global interoperable minimum standards in industry.

They can also focus on convening the technical, business and policy communities towards the safe and secure use of emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence.

Moreover, they can concentrate on increasing the resilience of the new digital ecosystems and industries – increasingly important but less protected. Together, these efforts can help ensure our digital future.