StarLink roadshow spotlights AI cyber defence — Arabian Post

StarLink opened its 2026 roadshow in Riyadh on 19 April, pitching a vision of cyber defence in which autonomous systems are used not only to detect threats but to counter AI-enabled attacks at machine speed, as companies across the Middle East weigh how far they can trust software agents with critical security decisions.

The event series, branded “The Silent War of AI vs AI”, is scheduled to run from 19 April to 17 June across Riyadh, Jeddah, Muscat, Amman, Cairo, Doha and Kuwait City, according to StarLink’s official registration page. Riyadh was listed as the first stop, followed by Jeddah on 21 April, Muscat on 29 April, Amman on 11 May, Cairo on 18 May, Doha on 15 June and Kuwait City on 17 June.

StarLink, an Infinigate Group company headquartered in Dubai, presents itself as a regional digital adviser spanning cyber resilience, cloud transformation, agentic automation and enterprise AI. That positioning matters because the roadshow lands at a time when the cyber industry is moving from simple automation towards “agentic” systems designed to analyse, decide and act with limited human intervention. Google Cloud Security, one of the vendors promoting that model, says AI agents can triage, investigate and respond at machine speed while remaining under human control.

That promise is resonating because the broader threat environment is shifting fast. The World Economic Forum said in its Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 that AI is transforming cyber “on both sides of the fight”, strengthening defence while enabling more sophisticated attacks. The same report said 94% of surveyed organisations expect AI to be the most significant driver of change in cybersecurity in the year ahead, while the share of organisations with processes to assess the security of AI tools before deployment rose to 64% in 2026 from 37% in 2025.

For corporate security teams, that means the appeal of these systems is no longer limited to efficiency. It is also about coping with threat velocity. Anomali, one of the companies participating in the Riyadh stop, framed the shift bluntly, saying traditional security operations centres are struggling to keep up and that the future is moving from automation to autonomy. LinkShadow, another participant, said organisations must rethink digital trust as AI reshapes both attack and defence strategies.

Still, the roadshow’s central pitch comes with a tension that is becoming harder to ignore. The same technologies that allow defenders to accelerate alert triage, threat hunting and response orchestration are also widening the attack surface. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 paper on AI and cybersecurity warned that organisations need a risk-based approach to adoption, cross-functional oversight and a clear inventory of where AI is being used, especially where systems are mission-critical. Google’s own security material, while strongly promotional, also stresses that human control should not disappear from the loop.

That caution is one reason events such as StarLink’s matter beyond vendor marketing. They have become forums where chief information security officers, channel partners and technology suppliers test a practical question: how much autonomy is enough? In wealthy Gulf markets investing heavily in digital infrastructure, smart cities, cloud migration and AI-led public services, the issue is no longer whether AI will enter security operations, but how to govern it without slowing response times or creating new systemic weaknesses.

Identity security, exposure management, network detection and autonomous SOC tooling are emerging as the most visible themes around the roadshow, judging by public partner posts and event promotion. That reflects where spending is moving. Security leaders are under pressure to cut attacker dwell time, reduce analyst fatigue and deal with increasingly complex phishing, reconnaissance and social engineering campaigns aided by generative AI. The commercial race is therefore shifting from standalone tools to integrated platforms that claim to bring context, speed and automated action together.

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