AI Growth Drives Rising Demand for Billion-Dollar Security
Demand for artificial intelligence systems security is expected to rise sharply as companies move AI into production, with the market projected to approach $8 billion by 2030, according to a new report from the Dell’Oro Group.
The authors of the AI and Cloud-native Security Advanced Research Report found that enterprise spending is shifting toward AI-driven systems, creating demand for tools that secure models, components, data, agents, and AI workflows.
More than 60 companies are expected to increase activity across areas including model and component security, AI validation, red teaming, AI security posture management, runtime guardrails, and agent security, the report said.
AI security is emerging as a distinct category within cybersecurity, they suggested, as enterprises deploy systems that retrieve data, invoke tools, maintain memory, and take actions.
“The vendor rush reflects a broader buyer problem: security teams must now govern not just where workloads run, but how AI systems reason, retrieve, invoke tools, and act,” said Mauricio Sanchez, senior director at Dell’Oro Group, in a statement.
The report's authors found that the growth of AI models, autonomous agents, and complex workflows is creating new risks and security requirements. In their report, they characterized AI security as a cloud-native discipline focused on protecting entire AI systems, rather than simply applications or infrastructure.
The report's authors said they expect broader enterprise spending on AI systems, which underpins their forecast, to reach nearly $400 billion by 2030. They concluded that this shows that the opportunity for AI systems security is tied to production AI adoption, not only to public cloud spending.
They also expect runtime control to become a key battleground as prompts, retrieved context, outputs, tool calls, memory, and agent action chains require continuous monitoring and enforcement.
“Enterprise AI spend is moving beyond chat and copilots into systems that retrieve data, call tools, maintain memory, and take action, creating a new security category around the AI system itself,” Sanchez said.