Singapore organisations are among the most willing in the world to hand cybersecurity decisions to AI, but that trust has yet to translate into fewer or shorter cyber incidents, according to new research from Arctic Wolf.

The cybersecurity and AI company’s 2026 AI & Cybersecurity Trends Report, based on a survey of 1,350 IT and security decision-makers worldwide including in Singapore, found 60 per cent of Singapore organisations trust AI to independently triage alerts and 56 per cent trust it to patch vulnerabilities without human oversight – both well above the 42 per cent global average. Yet 61 per cent still experienced a major cyber incident in the past year, with 13 per cent reporting severe disruption lasting six to nine months, more than three times the global rate.

AI tops Singapore’s cybersecurity priority list

AI, LLMs and agentic AI – along with their privacy implications – now rank as Singapore’s single leading cybersecurity concern, with 53 per cent citing secure AI adoption and data transformation as their top priority, compared with 41 per cent globally. The report, conducted by Sapio Research, found 94 per cent of organisations worldwide now use large language models, and the same share say AI capabilities influence cybersecurity purchasing decisions. Yet only 14 per cent have made AI central to their security operations strategy.

The skills shortage is compounding the problem: 52 per cent of Singapore organisations are turning to managed security services to bridge the cybersecurity talent gap, against 39 per cent globally.

Confidence and caution, but not yet resilience

“What stands out about Singapore is that organisations here trust AI more than almost anywhere else in the world, and they’re also more clear-eyed about its risks. That combination of confidence and caution is the right instinct, but it hasn’t yet translated into stronger outcomes,” said Steve Hunter, Director of Engineering, APAC, Arctic Wolf. “The priority now isn’t adopting agentic AI faster, it’s building the oversight, governance and human expertise around it so that trust is earned rather than assumed.”

Globally, nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) of respondents reported a significant cybersecurity incident in the past year, and almost half of affected organisations suffered disruptions lasting two weeks or longer. Despite this, 96 per cent of leaders remain confident their teams can keep pace with the volume and complexity of today’s threats – a gap the report frames as a growing disconnect between perceived readiness and real-world outcomes.

Adam Marre, Chief Information Security Officer at Arctic Wolf, said organisations have already committed to AI in security operations; the remaining question is trust. “Security leaders want the speed, scale, and efficiency AI can deliver, but they also need confidence that the outcomes are trustworthy, explainable, and aligned to their business,” he said. “The future of security operations will belong to organisations that combine trusted AI with human expertise to move faster, make better decisions, and build greater resilience.”