The CEO of the cybersecurity firm Gen Digital says AI is pushing the digital world into a phase where trust collapses faster than human intuition can keep up.
In a new interview on CNBC, Vincent Pilette warns that AI is rapidly blurring the line between what is real and what is fake online, creating conditions for large-scale financial harm driven by synthetic identities and personalized fraud.
“I think 2026 will be that year where the human intuition, if you want, will be behind the digital world, all powered by AI. The line between real and fake will become harder to trust and to judge. And so human verification for consumers will be absolutely essential. You’ll see the online truth and trust awards, synthetic identities, scraping your personal data and combining that with fake data to get a fake AI-powered persona to create financial damage will be all over the consumers.”
He points to concrete data showing how fast the threat is already scaling, particularly in e-commerce.
“Just in these seasons, we’ve now blocked 140,000 AI-powered e-commerce fake websites. And that’s all around attacking the consumers and trying to tap into their wallets.”
While consumer protection remains Gen Digital’s core focus, Pilette says companies themselves are facing a parallel escalation in attacks driven by the same AI capabilities.
“So, first of all, we are protecting the consumer. We’re all about the consumer. But you are right that companies will face a continued increase in cyber attacks. They’ll be bigger. They’ll be more sophisticated. They’ll become systematic.”
He says attackers are expanding their reach by exploiting AI across multiple layers of the digital economy.
“Exploiting this broader surface now around AI, supply chain, financial system.”
Pilette says that both consumer fraud and corporate cyber risk now converge on a single pressure point.
“And I guess this common denominator between consumer risk and company risk is really the identity. That’s the new battleground between consumers and businesses where the attackers are.”
He closes by warning that generative AI allows attackers to scale fraud in a way that feels personal, targeted and harder to detect.
“They’re really trying to increase their surface using AI, and now using generative AI to really attack consumers at scale, being personal, one-to-one relationship.”
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