Leveraging AI to enhance cyber resilience

As India’s digital economy accelerates, Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) organisations face growing cyber threats. With increasing online transactions, customer data collection, and omnichannel engagement, cyber resilience, the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover, and adapt to cyber incidents, has become a strategic imperative. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful enabler in this domain.

AI as a catalyst for cyber resilience

AI-driven solutions can significantly strengthen cyber resilience by:

• Predictive Threat Intelligence: Machine learning models analyse historical attack patterns and global threat feeds to predict emerging risks, enabling proactive defense. Machine learning models evolve with new attack vectors, ensuring resilience against future threats.
• Automated Detection and Response: AI-powered Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems can detect anomalies in real time, reducing response times from hours to seconds.
• Behavioral Analytics: AI can monitor user and system behavior to identify deviations indicative of insider threats or account takeovers, critical for sectors handling sensitive consumer data.
• Adaptive Security Posture: AI enables dynamic, intelligence-driven approach to cybersecurity where defenses continuously evolve based on real-time threat intelligence, risk assessment, and business context. Unlike static security models, adaptive security anticipates changes in the threat landscape and adjusts controls accordingly, which is critical for achieving cyber resilience.
• Enhanced recovery capabilities: AI significantly enhances organisational capabilities in IT system recovery after disruptions. AI systems implemented by organisations have demonstrated their efficacy in reducing downtime through automated problem detection and resolution. Furthermore, AI can facilitate automated backups and restore processes, ensuring minimal data loss and service interruption. Organisations that have integrated AI into their recovery strategies report enhanced resilience and faster recovery times, thereby maintaining operational continuity and safeguarding critical assets.

For D2C and B2C businesses, these capabilities translate into safeguarding customer trust, minimising downtime, and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations like India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA).

Cyber resilience driving AI adoption

Interestingly, cyber resilience doesn’t just benefit from AI, it also accelerates AI adoption. Organisations hesitant to deploy AI often cite concerns about data security and operational risks. A robust cyber resilience framework mitigates these fears by:

• Securing AI Models and Data Pipelines: Protecting training data and algorithms from tampering builds confidence in AI integrity. Implementing encryption, access controls, and integrity checks to prevent unauthorised manipulation of training datasets or algorithms. By safeguarding these components against tampering, organisations ensure trustworthy outputs, maintain compliance, and build confidence in AI-driven decisions, reinforcing resilience and reliability across digital ecosystems.
• Ensuring Business Continuity: Resilient systems reduce the perceived risk of disruptions in AI-driven automation during cyber incidents. By leveraging predictive analytics techniques, organisations can anticipate potential failures and preemptively address vulnerabilities. Using machine learning and AI tools,  historical and real-time data can be analysed to identify patterns and anomalies, enabling faster diagnosis and resolution of issues.
• Regulatory Alignment: Demonstrating resilience helps organisations meet compliance standards, making AI deployments smoother and less risky.

As trust in digital infrastructure grows, businesses are more willing to integrate AI into customer experience, personalisation, and supply chain optimisation, key differentiators in competitive D2C and B2C markets.

The road ahead

For Indian organisations, the synergy between AI and cyber resilience is not optional, it’s foundational. Investments in AI-powered cybersecurity tools, coupled with a resilience-first mindset, will define the winners in an era where consumer trust is paramount. By embedding AI into security strategies today, businesses can future-proof themselves against tomorrow’s threats while unlocking the full potential of digital transformation.

Authored by Nitin Shah, Partner – Digital Trust and Head – Cyber Security, Resilience and Privacy GRC, KPMG in India and Merril Cherian, Partner - Digital Trust and National Leader – Cyber Resilience, KPMG in India

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of CyberMedia )