AI brings both risk and opportunity to businesses. Stu Bradley, the senior vice president for risk, fraud and compliance for data management and analytics platform SAS, sees both up close. SAS has integrated AI into its platform, allowing deeper data analysis and better solutions. But many SAS customers are in regulated industries with highly protected data—including financial services and healthcare—so the company has a keen eye on potential problems.

During the SAS Innovate conference in Washington, D.C. last month, I got to talk to Bradley about the cybersecurity threats AI poses for all industries—not just the highly regulated ones—as well as how to make sure you’re set to get the best value from your company’s AI investment. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Artificial Intelligence

While CMOs are working to revamp company websites and online content for AI agents, many are running into a technical problem. New research from BrightEdge shows only 3% of websites are set up for easy reading by agents in optimized formats such as the simple text language Markdown—meaning content on 97% of websites isn’t easily found and surfaced by AI chatbots. If it is, it’s only after agents have spent a long time scouring the website, adding tremendously to the bandwidth and compute the site uses.

“We really think about this as the rise of almost like a second web: this layer of how agents play a huge role in helping customers, consumers, and B2B buyers really be able to navigate brands and services out there,” BrightEdge founder and CEO Jim Yu told me.

Yu said companies basically need to produce their sites for the AI agent audience—a format that isn’t built for people, but will inform the responses that people get when they query AI. This takes more than adding to a schema, Yu said. It’s actually more programming work to do in-house or with a third party. But it’s worthwhile. In a pilot done by BrightEdge, sites made more accessible to AI agents had an uncontested advantage over competitors that had not, and saw a site payload reduction of 90%.

The companies that have added Markdown so far, Yu said, are ones that likely think more about efficiency. WordPress, Mixpanel, ElevenLabs and Palantir are among the early movers—but so is Greenpeace, which Yu said is probably thinking more about the energy savings.

Yu said the likely reason so few companies have taken this step is that AI is moving so quickly and CIOs are unaware of it. However, he said, this doesn’t mean that company websites need to be completely overhauled. What they already have—optimized for traditional search and human consumption—is........

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