Talent Shortages Bite as 80% of UK Firms Hit with AI Threats

The “cyber readiness” of UK businesses is alarmingly low, with AI-related attacks threatening to overwhelm understaffed security teams, according to a new report from Cisco.

The tech giant’s 2025 Cybersecurity Readiness Index is based on a survey of 8000 private sector security and business leaders in 30 global markets, including 300 in the UK.

Responding companies’ readiness was evaluated across five areas – identity, network resilience, “machine trustworthiness,” cloud reinforcement, and “AI fortification.”

Disappointingly, just 4% of global (and UK) respondents were classed as “mature” in terms of readiness – although in the UK this figure had doubled from the previous report.

This is particularly alarming in light of the large share (78%) of UK firms that experienced AI-related incidents last year. These ranged from exposure of training data to model theft, data poisoning, prompt injection and AI-enhanced social engineering.

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These risks may be compounded by the fact that over half (52%) of UK firms aren’t confident in being able to detect shadow AI in the organization. The same share (52%) of respondents claimed their employees fully understand AI-related threats.

These findings are also concerning given persistent cybersecurity skills shortages. Cisco claimed that nearly half (48%) of UK businesses have over 10 positions in their security team that remain unfilled. This is an increase from last year’s figure of 41%.

Time for AI

However, there at least is some awareness of the scale of the problem. That’s part of the reason why 92% of UK organizations are using AI to tackle cyber risk, including 81% using AI tools for threat detection, and 71% for response and recovery.

Overall, 65% said they are investing in AI-driven technologies – up from 55% last year. 

There’s an urgent financial need to do so with 32% of breached organizations stating they suffered financial losses exceeding $500,000. Yet only 45% of UK respondents claimed they allocate more than 10% of their IT budget to cybersecurity – down 9% annually.