Where AI can make a difference in public sector’s cybersecurity landscape

The question for government organisations is no longer whether to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) for security, but how fast and targeted to implement it to stay ahead of cybercriminals.

 

Cyber attackers and defenders alike are racing to exploit AI capabilities. AI-powered phishing and scam campaigns are increasingly personalised, targeted and cheaper to deploy.

 

As threats move at machine speed and timelines become even shorter, the tools that enable more sophisticated threats may also be the ones needed to enhance security.

 

At Elastic(ON) Singapore 2026, leaders from Singapore’s organisations shared insights on how to leverage technology to sharpen security capabilities in this digital era.

 

The same properties that make AI useful to attackers, such as speed, scale and ability to process great volumes of information, are equally valuable on the defensive side, notes Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) Group Director, Desmond Loh.

 

Loh was a judge for the 2026 edition of the Elastic Forge the Future hackathon, where participants designed agentic AI solutions for real-world impact.

 

Loh says that AI is helping analysts identify real threats, filter noise, and target response efforts more effectively. He points to the signal-to-noise problem in cybersecurity, which refers to when security teams field thousands of alerts daily, most of which are false positives.

 

This is where AI can make a difference, not by replacing human judgment but by freeing it up more time for informed decisions, notes Loh. With AI filtering out false positives, security teams get more time target remediation efforts more precisely.

 

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