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Dive Brief:

• AI isn’t making cybersecurity professionals’ jobs much easier, and businesses aren’t always pairing AI spending with clear AI strategies, a new report finds.
• In addition, nearly seven in 10 cyber workers say their jobs have become more difficult over the past two years, despite the AI automation boon, according to the latest edition of a cybersecurity workforce survey by the Information Systems Security Association and Omdia.
• One-quarter of respondents said their companies had increased AI spending without clearly defining how they would integrate those AI tools into their existing processes.

Dive Insight:

More than eight in 10 organizations are using AI for cybersecurity tasks or plan to do so soon, according to the report, with half of users deploying it for penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, nearly half using it to predict risks and 38% using it to detect threats.

But those tools cannot fully replace skilled cybersecurity professionals, and the workforce that is still primarily responsible for defending enterprises is struggling with burnout and demoralization as the threat environment intensifies.

Nearly half of cyber workers are considering leaving their job, ISSA and Omdia found, with 17% saying they think about it regularly and 30% saying they think about it occasionally. More than half say they’re thinking about leaving the industry altogether, with 20% saying they think about it regularly.

The top reasons cited for burnout were high stress (53%), a lack of career advancement (37%), a bad work-life balance (34%) and a lack of leadership commitment to organizational cybersecurity (33%).

That burnout is exacerbating an already-large nationwide cybersecurity skills gap, which in turn is making it difficult for businesses to secure their networks. Three-quarters of survey respondents said the skills shortage had affected their organizations, while 23% said it had had significant impacts.

The skills shortage has had a wide range of consequences. Forty-four percent of respondents said they’d seen colleagues redirected from strategic, long-term work to emergencies because there was no one else to deal with the crisis, while similar shares of respondents cited increased workload (42%) and increased burnout (37%).

Meanwhile, only 29% of respondents described their organizations’ cybersecurity cultures as “advanced,” with half of respondents instead rating them “average.” Workforce training, resource investments and governance improvements topped the list of steps that respondents said would improve their cybersecurity programs.

ISSA and Omdia’s survey is based on interviews with 380 IT and cybersecurity professionals done in January and February 2026.