You do not need an AI security platform. You need a policy.

On August 26, 2026, Gartner published a forecast putting the market for securing AI at almost $4.8 billion in 2027, up 68.7 percent over the prior year, and headed for $7.7 billion by 2028. The money splits across AI application security, usage control, governance platforms, and AI gateways. Gartner also predicts that by 2029, more than half of successful attacks on AI agents will come down to two things: access control weaknesses and prompt injection.

Read that as a signal rather than a shopping list. Large enterprises are about to spend serious money building tooling for a problem that, at the size of most Triad businesses, is still solvable with decisions instead of software.

What the forecast is really telling you

Strip out the market sizing and Gartner is saying something quite simple. The risk in AI is not that the model says something strange. The risk is that an AI tool has been given access to more than it should have, and that someone can talk it into using that access.

That is a permissions problem and a policy problem. Both are things you can fix without buying anything.

The version that fits a 40-person business

Know which tools are actually in use. Not which ones you approved, which ones people are using. Staff adopt AI tools the way they adopted personal cloud storage a decade ago, quietly and with good intentions. Ask, without blame, and write the list down.

Decide what may never be pasted in. Client files, patient or donor records, payroll, anything under a confidentiality obligation. One short paragraph, in plain English, that a new hire can understand on their first day.

Name the approved tools. People will use something. Giving them a sanctioned option with an appropriate license is far more effective than a prohibition everyone quietly ignores.

Review what your AI assistant can reach. If you have enabled an AI assistant inside Microsoft 365, check what it can see. In most tenants it inherits the permissions of the person using it, which means it will happily surface anything that has been over-shared for years. That is not an AI failure, it is a permissions failure that AI makes visible.

The order matters

Do the permissions review before you expand AI access, not after. An assistant layered on top of a tidy environment is useful. The same assistant on top of a shared drive where everyone can see everything is an efficient way to distribute information that was never meant to travel.

That sequence is the whole of it. A written policy, a list of approved tools, and a permissions review will retire most of the risk that enterprises are about to spend billions on, and you can finish all three this quarter. We help Triad organizations work through exactly this as part of practical AI adoption, and we will tell you plainly when the answer is that you do not need to buy anything.