Recommendations for NATO

A final Middle Eastern panellist offered a strategic framework for AI, noting that companies across the region who once considered their core business to be industrial production now increasingly find themselves in the software and analytics business. The deep digital transformation occurring across the global South creates important challenges, given the speed and exponential growth of data and analytics. Cyber-attacks are becoming larger, more damaging and more mobile and global, while the COVID pandemic has moved large parts of the global economy online, creating a far greater attack surface for hostile cyber actors. Facing this challenge, so-called “underachievers” (including businesses in the region) are burdened by fragmented structures, weak governance and blurred lines of accountability, while overachievers tend to take a human-centric (rather than a data- or code-centric) approach to the problem. Cyber-resilience is an increasingly important characteristic for both civil society and governments across the region. This extends beyond data consumers to SCADA systems, industrial microprocessors, and an increasing range of autonomous devices and systems.