For years, convergence was something we talked about on conference panels. It’s now how most security organizations operate, or are trying to.
In a June 2026 Wakefield Research survey of 300 U.S. security and wealth professionals, commissioned by 360 Privacy, 84% of CISOs and CSOs and 87% of senior security and privacy executives agreed it’s now impossible to separate physical security from cybersecurity. 64% of CISOs and CSOs said their organizations have merged the two functions or are in the middle of it, and another 25% have a merger planned.
So that argument is settled. The harder part is making a merged team work against an adversary who now has AI doing the legwork.
AI took the boring part out of targeting
Building a profile of an executive used to take real time. Pull property records. Cross-reference social accounts. Find the spouse. Work out the gym schedule. It was slow, tedious work, and tedium is an underrated defense.
AI removed most of it. A model can stitch scattered records into a usable profile in minutes. The security leaders in the survey see where this is heading: 89% of CISOs and CSOs believe automated AI systems that probe and exploit digital vulnerabilities will be an existential threat to personal and corporate security within the next two years.
The raw material is already sitting there. 360 Privacy’s monitoring records, taken when individuals enrolled and before any remediation, show the median person had personal information on 121 distinct sources and a home address on 112. Nearly 60% of those exposure records also named a family member. That’s the starting kit for an AI-assisted attacker, and it costs them almost nothing.
The people being protected are behind
87% of CISOs and CSOs and 88% of security and privacy executives said it’s difficult to keep the people they protect technologically literate enough to stay safe from AI-driven threats, compared with 68% of wealth professionals.
Some of that is speed. The threat changes faster than any principal’s patience for security briefings. In early 2024, a finance employee at the engineering firm Arup sent about $25.6 million after a video call with what turned out to be deepfakes of the company’s CFO and colleagues. A few years earlier, that attack wasn’t practical.
Some of it is physical. 60% of CISOs and CSOs are spending more time on physical threats to the people they protect than they were a year ago. An AI-built dossier is how a digital exposure turns into a car parked outside someone’s house.
What a converged program does differently
Merging teams on an org chart is the easy part. I’ve seen plenty of converged org charts with no converged decisions behind them. These are the things I’d look at first.
Give exposure one owner. When a principal’s address turns up on a new data broker site, whose problem is it? If the answer depends on whether someone decides it’s “cyber” or “physical,” you have a gap, and the adversary will find it before your weekly sync does.
Run the AI-assisted reconnaissance yourself. Point the same kinds of tools an attacker would use at your own executives and their households, with their consent, and see what comes back. Then brief the principal with that output. A page about them lands in a way a slide about industry trends never will.
Watch the second ring. Executive assistants, chiefs of staff, spouses, kids. 85% of CISOs and CSOs plan to put more emphasis on family members’ behavior that raises exposure. That’s the right instinct. The family’s accounts are often where an automated search finds what the executive was careful never to post.
Rehearse the cross-domain week. Build a scenario where a leaked credential, a harassment campaign, and an unfamiliar car near the residence all show up within a few days. Walk it through with cyber, physical, legal, and communications in the same room. Find out who calls whom before it’s real.
In any risk environment, the adversary has a vote. AI just lets them cast it faster.
Convergence was the right call. Now the merged team has to move at the speed of the tools pointed at it.
Charles “Chuck” Randolph is Chief Strategy Officer at 360 Privacy. He brings more than 30 years of experience in close protection, protective intelligence, and enterprise risk management, including senior security roles at Microsoft, AT-RISK International, and Ontic. He is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, a co-founder of the International Protective Security Board (IPSB), and co-author of The Protector’s Edge: Leadership Through Strategy and Action (Routledge).
