Kai CEO: AI cuts cybersecurity response from months to minutes
A Wall Street Journal market-talk roundup on Thursday captured divergent analyst calls on global chipmakers alongside two executive warnings at the WSJ Technology Council Summit about the speed and reach of AI deployment.
Bank of America’s Didier Scemama wrote that consensus expectations for Dutch semiconductor-equipment maker ASML and smaller rival ASM International remain too low. He said consensus calls for ASML sales and earnings per share to grow 28% and 41%, respectively, over the next three years. Still, ASML’s capacity is essentially sold out for the next 18 months, and competition from China and U.S. startups “remains distant at best,” Scemama wrote. He added that consensus expectations for ASM International’s gross margin — essentially flat at around 51% over the next three years — may also prove too conservative given improving mix and pricing. ASML shares traded 2% higher at 1,423.60 euros, while ASM International traded 1.5% higher at 783 euros.
Scemama was also positive on Infineon Technologies’ agreement to sell its NOR Flash and F-RAM business to Taiwan-based Winbond Electronics for $1.12 billion. The unit being divested serves automotive, industrial and infrastructure customers. “In our view, the divestment removes a business with no direct participation in structural AI/data center growth, supports further deleveraging and has a negligible impact on EPS,” Scemama wrote. Infineon shares traded 1.7% lower at 54.05 euros.
South Korean flat-panel display maker LG Display drew a more cautious call from Daishin Securities’ Kangho Park, who lowered his operating-profit forecasts for the company by about 25% for 2026 and 11% for 2027. Park attributed the pressure to a stronger won — the dollar has weakened nearly 13% against the won since late June — and to higher prices for semiconductors and other raw materials that have lifted information-technology device prices and dampened demand. He still expects LG Display’s earnings to gradually improve on likely higher shipments of organic light-emitting diode panels. Daishin cut its target price to 12,000 won from 17,000 won while keeping a buy rating. Shares fell 0.8% to close at 8,400 won.
At the WSJ Technology Council Summit, Indeed Chief Information and Security Officer Anthony Moisant argued that humans must remain part of the loop when AI systems make consequential decisions. “If left unchecked, those decisions can create unintended downstream effects,” Moisant said. He gave Indeed’s own work as an example: a bad AI-driven decision could close a door for a job seeker — “Preventing somebody from getting a job because we made a bad experimentation decision would be pretty horrendous,” he said. The remedy, Moisant added, is education: “We’ve got to have the guard-rails in place. We’ve got to have that rigor around cost transparency, around security, around privacy, around education.”
Galina Antova, CEO of cybersecurity firm Kai, told the same summit that AI agents have compressed a cybersecurity workflow that once took months into five to eight minutes. “So when the attackers are executing at machine speed, defense can do that at the same time,” Antova said. She acknowledged that most large enterprises must incrementally revamp their cybersecurity stacks to reach an end-to-end AI-powered solution — “You’re flying the plane as you’re rebuilding it,” she said — but said the transition horizon is “few months,” not three years, because “we don’t have that kind of time.”