Most small business owners didn’t sign up to be cybersecurity experts. Yet that’s exactly what the current threat landscape demands, and the gap between what attackers can do and what SMBs have in place to stop them has never been wider.
Artificial intelligence is widening that gap from both sides. AI shopping agents from Google, Microsoft, and others now guide customers from product discovery through checkout in a single conversation, so transactions increasingly reach an SMB’s payment system without the customer ever visiting the business’s website. At the same time, those same AI capabilities are giving attackers faster, more adaptive tools to target the payment infrastructure on which those businesses depend.