‘AI is reshaping business operations and innovation, but also redefining the attack surfaces and empowering adversaries’: Kartik Shahani, Vice President of India & SAARC, CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike’s AI-native Falcon platform delivers a unified security model for AI by providing visibility and real-time protection everywhere AI operates, from endpoints to SaaS platforms, browsers, and cloud environments. Kartik Shahani, Vice President of India & SAARC, CrowdStrike explains to Bhavya Bagga, Business Reporter, CXO Media exclusively that With AI adoption expanding organisations’ attack surfaces, strong governance and security for AI is essential. 

What are the key cybersecurity challenges organisations across India are facing today?

Indian organisations face a threat landscape that is intensifying in sophistication, speed, and stealth. The 2026 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report reveals that attacks now break out – from initial compromise to lateral movement across systems – at an average of 29 minutes, with the fastest attacks occurring in just 27 seconds. Adversaries are weaponizing AI across the attack chain to accelerate operations and deliver highly convincing social engineering campaigns that fuel identity-driven attacks.

Identity is the new perimeter, as attackers shift from breaking in to logging in as legitimate users with stolen credentials. Once inside, they move laterally across identities, endpoints and cloud domains by blending in with legitimate activity. This shift to identity-driven attacks is highlighted by 82% of detections now being malware-free, compared to just 51% in 2020. 

Cloud environments are a common entry point of identity-based attacks, as adversaries exploit cloud data, configurations, and controls to gain access to systems – with valid account abuse accounting for 35% of cloud incidents.

To address these security challenges, organisations must adopt a unified security approach. A modern, AI-native security platform enables organisations to consolidate their security architecture and provides unified visibility and AI-powered protection across identity, endpoint and cloud domains.

How does CrowdStrike’s AI-driven security platform enable organisations to address adversaries’ increasingly sophisticated cyber threats?

As outlined in CrowdStrike’s 2026 GTR, AI-enabled adversaries increased their operations by 89% year-on-year in 2025, with AI compressing their time to execution from days to minutes and collapsing the window for defenders to respond. With the threat landscape accelerating in speed and sophistication, organisations must embrace AI-powered defences that provide proactive threat disruption to level the playing field and shift the advantage in their favour.

The CrowdStrike Falcon Agentic Security Platform provides the foundation for autonomous security operations, with the industry’s richest AI-ready data layer and revolutionary capabilities to operationalise AI securely, intelligently, and at scale. At its core is the Enterprise Graph, which unifies CrowdStrike’s pioneering graph technology and telemetry from across the enterprise to build a living, connected model of the enterprise – with one common query language built for AI. This makes every signal instantly actionable by agents and security analysts. 

Trained on years of SOC decisions from CrowdStrike Falcon Complete’s elite security analysts, agents inherit the judgment to think, reason, and act like an elite security analyst – with Falcon-grade governance ensuring humans remain in command and control.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming central to cybersecurity operations. How does CrowdStrike enable organisations to enhance their detection and response with agentic security capabilities to prevent threats in real time?

With attacks breaking out at record speeds, organisations need an agentic security approach that delivers the autonomous capabilities required to outpace threats. Security agents that can think, reason, and respond at machine speed – within predefined guardrails – across identities, endpoints, and cloud environments empower organisations to establish autonomous security operations. 

CrowdStrike’s Agentic Security platform enables security teams to command and orchestrate security agents across the security lifecycle, connecting context with data, so they can reason and act dynamically together in real time.

How is CrowdStrike helping organisations secure their adoption of AI, whether it be LLMs, models or AI agents?

CrowdStrike’s AI-native Falcon platform delivers a unified security model for AI by providing visibility and real-time protection everywhere AI operates, from endpoints – the point of AI execution – to SaaS platforms, browsers, and cloud environments. 

To secure AI at the execution layer, the Falcon platform delivers AI runtime protection on the endpoint to detect suspicious behaviour and contain threats before they spread, automatically discovers shadow AI deployments, assesses the blast radius of a compromise, and extends prompt-layer protection to desktop AI applications – such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. 

Securing the AI interaction layer requires organisations to have runtime inspection for AI services and detection of prompt injection attacks, data leaks, and policy violations. As part of the Falcon platform, Falcon AI Detection and Response (AIDR) provides real-time protection for the interaction layer and AI workloads by securing prompts, responses, and agent actions at enterprise scale. Falcon AIDR also extends protection across cloud environments to secure AI workloads running in the cloud.

The Falcon platform secures AI systems, data, and agents operating across SaaS platforms and cloud environments by delivering unified, real-time visibility of SaaS usage, AI agent activity and data access, how data flows into AI services, and by identifying shadow AI operating in the cloud and application layers.

Based on your conversations with technology leaders, including CIO and CISOs, why is securing cloud environments more important than ever?

The CrowdStrike 2026 GTR highlights a 37% rise in cloud-conscious intrusions in 2025, including a 266% increase in cloud intrusions from state-nexus threat actors, demonstrating attackers’ increasing prioritisation of cloud-focused operations and attacks. 

As organisations increase their adoption of cloud technology and AI tools that operate in the cloud, securing cloud environments requires comprehensive cloud security capabilities that eliminate cloud risk at every layer. Cloud detection and response (CDR) and runtime protection are essential for stopping cloud breaches. With adversaries weaponising AI to accelerate their attacks and infiltrate cloud environments, traditional CDR capabilities that rely on static risk models and log batch processing to surface a detection every 15 minutes are simply too slow for today’s threat landscape.

Delivered through the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, Falcon Cloud Security and its real-time CDR detect and stop cloud attacks the moment they begin with unified, real-time protection across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. 

Looking ahead, what strategies should Indian organisations adopt to stay ahead of accelerating cyber threats and what role should AI play?

Indian organisations must understand that AI is not only reshaping business operations and innovation, it’s redefining their attack surface, and empowering adversaries by enabling them to operate with greater speed and scale. As adversaries weaponise AI to accelerate their attacks, organisations need to adopt an AI-native security approach that delivers unified visibility and real-time protection across domains to stop breaches before they escalate. 

With AI adoption expanding organisations’ attack surfaces, strong governance and security for AI is essential. Organisations should establish clear policies for AI, monitor their workforce’s AI use, enforce strong access controls and data classification to prevent data leaks, secure AI workloads, mandate security configurations for new AI solutions, and rigorously assess third-party security risks.