Heimdal Survey: Executives Four Times More Confident About AI Risk Than the Teams Managing It

London, United Kingdom, June 17th, 2026, CyberNewswire New research from cybersecurity company Heimdal finds 29% of US executives say AI risk is under control, against 7% of the practitioners running it day-to-day. They are the ones creating clear guardrails while helping employees use AI responsibly.” The report concludes that organizations should treat AI as part of the core IT estate, applying the same scrutiny to AI services as to any other critical supplier, including procurement review, contractual data-handling terms, a current inventory of sanctioned and unsanctioned AI tools, and technical controls over access, execution, action chains, and privilege.

The AI Risk

The full report is available at https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/state-ai-risk-management/ About the Research The State of AI Risk Management in 2026 is based on a survey of 1,000 IT professionals (500 UK, 500 US), conducted via Pollfish from 1 to 8 May 2026.

Further details indicate that in the US, 29% of C-suite and VP respondents say their organization has AI risk under control, against 7% of the mid-level practitioners managing it.

Among UK teams with full visibility into AI use, 56% flag data leakage as a top concern, against 27% of teams with none.

Heimdal today published The State of AI Risk Management in 2026, a survey of 1,000 IT professionals across the United Kingdom and the United States.

Impact

on AI Systems

London, United Kingdom, June 17th, 2026, CyberNewswire New research from cybersecurity company Heimdal finds 29% of US executives say AI risk is under control, against 7% of the practitioners running it day-to-day. The report’s headline finding is a divide inside the same organizations: the closer a person sits to the day-to-day running of AI, the less confident they are that the risk is contained. Many organizations believe having an AI policy means they are prepared, but a policy alone does not create visibility.

Safeguards

1. The companies seeing the best results are not the ones trying to restrict AI.

Analysis

As AI tooling proliferates, security teams face expanding attack surfaces tied to model inference and data pipelines.

AI security teams should evaluate their model deployment pipelines for similar weaknesses, paying close attention to input validation, prompt injection defenses, output filtering, and access controls. Organizations building or deploying AI systems should incorporate adversarial testing and red-teaming exercises into their development lifecycle. Data governance policies may need updating to address the specific risks highlighted by this incident, including data leakage, model inversion, and unauthorized inference access. Security teams should also review logging and monitoring coverage for AI services, as traditional security tools may not detect model-specific attacks. Vendor security assessments should be refreshed for any third-party AI components in use.

Industry observers note that this type of development highlights the ongoing need for defense-in-depth strategies and proactive security posture management. Organizations that invest in regular security assessments and employee training tend to fare better when responding to emerging threats. The security community continues to share indicators and best practices to help defenders stay ahead.

Sources

1. https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/state-ai-risk-management/