Proofpoint’s global study finds that, despite having AI security controls in place, 54% of organizations in APAC are not fully confident they could detect compromised AI.

AI is increasingly permeating organizations and is now operational across most functions, with deployments spanning customer support, internal messaging, email workflows, and third-party collaboration. 

Proofpoint’s inaugural 2026 AI and Human Risk Landscape report explored the widening gap between how quickly organizations are operationalizing AI and how prepared they are to secure and investigate the risks that follow. 

The global study, which surveyed more than 1,400 security professionals across 20 industries and 12 countries (the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UAE, Australia, Japan, Singapore, India, and Brazil) in January 2026, examined how rapid AI adoption is transforming enterprise collaboration and exposing structural weaknesses in security controls and incident response.

“This year’s findings highlight a widening divide between AI adoption and security readiness,” said Ryan Kalember, Chief Strategy Officer, Proofpoint. “Organizations are scaling AI assistants and autonomous agents across core workflows, yet many cannot confirm their controls are effective or fully investigate incidents that move across collaboration channels.”

He added: “As AI becomes embedded in how work gets done, security leaders must rethink how they protect trusted interactions across people, data and AI systems.” 

APAC findings

Key APAC findings from the report include:

• AI Deployment Has Outpaced Security Readiness. AI adoption has moved into production faster than governance frameworks have matured. While 86% of organizations in APAC have deployed assistants beyond pilot stage and 74% are advancing autonomous agents, more than half (51%) describe security as catching up, inconsistent or reactive. Close to half (47%) of APAC organizations report experiencing a suspicious or confirmed AI-related incident, indicating that exposure is already present in live environments.
• Collaboration Channels Are the Primary AI Attack Surface. AI is expanding the attack surface, enabling threats to spread at machine speed and impact connected workflows. While email remains the most common threat vector at 60% in APAC, exposure now extends across SaaS and cloud applications (48%), AI assistants or agents (44%) and collaboration tools, including Teams or Slack (43%). Among organizations that experienced an AI-related incident, exposure increases across every channel, including 62% in email and 60% involving AI systems.
• Confidence Exceeds Control Effectiveness. While many organisations in APAC have security controls in place, they also lack assurance. two-fifths (60%) of organizations in APAC report having AI security coverage in place, yet more than half (54%) are not fully confident those controls would detect compromised AI. Further, 56% of organizations with controls still reported an AI-related incident. In APAC, gaps persist in training (48%), visibility into AI or agent activity (48%), and governance alignment across teams (46%).
• Investigation Readiness Lags Behind Incident Reality. When AI-related incidents occur, many organizations in APAC struggle to investigate them effectively. Only one-third (33%) of respondents say they are fully prepared to investigate an AI- or agent-related incident, and 45% report difficulty correlating threats across channels. As AI-related activity spans email, collaboration platforms and cloud systems, the ability to reconstruct events depends on visibility across connected environments, which many organisations do not yet have.
• Tool Sprawl is a Structural Barrier. Fragmentation across security stacks is compounding the challenge, limiting visibility and slowing response when incidents move across systems at machine speed. Most organizations (96%) in APAC say managing multiple security tools is at least moderately challenging, and more than half (55%) describe it as very or extremely difficult. Respondents cite operational cost pressures (47%), integration challenges (46%), and difficulty correlating threats (48%).
• Security Architecture Becomes a Strategic Priority as AI Scales. 54% of APAC organizations are actively pursuing vendor and tool consolidation, and 56% believe a unified platform is more effective than point solutions. Over the next 12 months, 66% plan to expand AI protections, 59% intend to extend collaboration channel coverage, and 60% expect to move toward a unified platform approach.

Mediating risks old and new

“While AI has introduced new risks, such as prompt engineering, its bigger impact has been amplifying the risks we’ve always had,” Kalember said. 

“Running untrusted code, mishandling sensitive data, and losing control of credentials are the same challenges that humans have created for decades. AI executes them at machine speed and scale. When organizations hand AI the keys to act on their behalf — across customers, partners, and internal systems — the blast radius of any one of those failures grows dramatically.” 

The answer, he said, is ‘not to treat AI as a novel threat category, but to apply rigorous, proven controls to what AI touches, what it runs, and what it’s allowed to authenticate as. “Organizations that get that foundation right early will scale AI confidently. Those that don’t are just automating their own exposure,” he warned.

“The priority now is to put stronger governance around how AI is used, what data it can access, and how activity is monitored across email, cloud and collaboration platforms,” said George Lee, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Proofpoint. 

“The organizations that will move fastest and safest will be those that improve data visibility, govern AI agents with the same discipline as privileged users, and reduce the blind spots created by fragmented security tools.”

To download the 2026 AI and Human Risk Landscape report, visit: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/resources/threat-reports/ai-human-risk-landscape-report