"Only we as cyber defenders know where our company's most valuable assets are. Only we know where our employees usually operate and what would look different. With AI, we can bring all that together and truly deeply understand the context we operate in. That is a cyber defence superpower," he says on the sidelines of Google Cloud Next '26 in Las Vegas.
For years, cybersecurity has been framed as a losing game for defenders, with cyber attackers needing only one way in. Francis deSouza, chief operating officer and president of Security Products at Google Cloud, says that assumption is starting to break down.
Cyber defenders, he says, already hold an advantage that has not been fully used. They understand their own environments in detail, from where critical assets sit to how employees typically behave. The constraint is speed. AI agents could change that by allowing organisations to act on that knowledge far more quickly.
