You’re a finance director at a global firm dialed in to a video call with headquarters, seeing and hearing familiar faces on the screen. The CFO walks you through urgent instructions from the CEO about a vendor payment that needs to be processed before the day ends. The company’s lawyer even calls you to confirm, sending over a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) for you to sign.
You follow procedure and initiate the transfer.
Only later do you learn that none of them were real. Every person on the call was a deepfake, their faces and voices generated by AI. By the time the deception came to light, almost half a million dollars already vanished. If you hadn’t reported it when you did, an additional US$1.4 million would have disappeared, too.
This isn’t a cautionary tale. It happened just months ago in Singapore, and it’s becoming alarmingly common across regions and industries. The same AI systems we use to streamline workflows and personalize customer experiences are now being weaponized to impersonate leaders, bypass verification checks, and exploit the people inside organizations.
No security stack can stop an attack if the people behind the screens can’t tell what’s real. The breakthrough won’t come from technology, but from the people who use it.
Your employees are the problem … and the solution
Human error contributed to 95 percent of data breaches in 2024. The most expensive incidents still start with an unknowing mistake.
Employees are adaptable, trusting, and fast-moving — traits that make them invaluable to the business but, at the same time, susceptible to social engineering. It’s no surprise that 93 percent of security leaders expect daily AI-powered attacks this year. Embedding AI literacy, analytical thinking, and decision support into their daily work can further strengthen their resilience and turn them into an adaptive layer of the enterprise’s security architecture.
Attackers already see your workforce as the easiest way in. With AI in their arsenal, they no longer need to rely on phishing attempts or clumsy impersonations. They can replicate an executive’s tone, mimic a customer’s voice, or build an entire fake identity that passes basic verification. It’s time to start seeing your workforce as your most strategic way to keep AI threats out.
From training to empowerment: What an AI-ready workforce looks like
AI is already part of everyday work, with 72 percent of employees now using AI tools regularly. Yet only 25 percent of frontline employees said they’ve received sufficient support from leadership on how and when to use them.
What organizations need now isn’t more awareness, but empowerment. That means building a workforce that’s not just cautious, but capable and equipped to use AI confidently. An AI-ready workforce is built on three pillars:
- AI literacy: Employees at every level must understand how AI-related threats differ from traditional ones. A deepfake call doesn’t behave like a phishing email. A synthetic identity doesn’t trigger the same pattern recognition as forged documents. Literacy is about understanding how deception is built so people can recognize what’s suspicious.
- AI skills: Employees must know how to use AI tools to validate requests, cross-check identities, detect anomalies, and make faster, more informed decisions. If attackers are automating deception, the workforce must automate detection, too.
- AI collaboration: As AI copilots and assistants become part of daily workflows, employees must learn how to work with them responsibly. That means understanding their limitations, spotting manipulated prompts, and analyzing their outputs instead of accepting them blindly.
This can’t stay siloed in IT or security. Finance teams, customer support agents, marketing analysts, and anyone who touches information, handles systems, or interacts with customers are now part of this human perimeter. AI enablement must become a shared competency, woven into onboarding, upskilling, and leadership development alike.
Case in point: A randomized controlled trial conducted this year found that focused, ongoing AI training and intervention improved the participants’ resistance to AI-driven deception by 7.87 percentage points in cognitive security tasks.
Partnerships and strategies that extend the human perimeter
Even for companies that understand the urgency of AI enablement, execution is a different story. Building training programs that evolve as fast as threats do, integrating AI tools into everyday workflows, and continuously upskilling employees — all while keeping the business running — is a heavy lift for any internal team. Most enterprises simply don’t have the scale, bandwidth, or depth of expertise to do it alone.
The right partners can accelerate readiness, bridge capability gaps, and push defensive reach far beyond a company’s own headcount. That’s why at TDCX, we train and equip our people — especially those who operate in high-risk environments like trust and safety, fraud prevention, and customer support where attackers often strike first — to act as a strong first line of defense.
Workforce enablement should not just be a soft skill requirement, but a part of security infrastructure. AI-ready employees lower the odds of a breach, shorten incident response times, strengthen compliance posture, and protect the brand in ways no tool or platform can match.
Getting there takes more than a budget line in IT. It needs a coordinated strategy that unites the C-suite, HR, and operations to make AI readiness a core function of how the business runs. It’ll be a paradigm shift in how we think about risk, resilience, and responsibility. As AI continues to evolve on both sides of the cybersecurity equation, organizations should invest in people with the same rigor and urgency that they invest in technology. After all, attackers already have AI in their arsenal. The advantage belongs to the companies whose people do, too.
Byron Fernandez is TDCX Group CIO and EVP. Byron brings 20 years of BPO experience in designing customer access strategies, inbound customer contact, outbound outreach, and supporting the different functions of a high-performing contact center. His expertise in verticals such as telecommunications, banking, insurance, FMCG, technology, and government contact centers make him ideally suited to the responsibility of leading TDCX units in various markets. Byron is a COPC-certified Implementation Leader, CIAC-certified Strategic Leader, and a member of the IAOP. He is also one of the very few individuals in the country to be presented with the Career Achievement Award by the CCAM.
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Featured image: Tom Kotov on Unsplash
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