Talking Supply Chain: Is AI expanding cyber risk?

Cybersecurity has become one of the most material, and least understood, risks facing modern supply chains. In this episode of Talking Supply Chain, host Brian Straight sits down with Tim Freestone, chief strategy officer at Kiteworks, to unpack why AI-driven automation, agentic workflows, and digital collaboration tools are rapidly expanding the supply chain attack surface well beyond traditional IT environments.

Freestone explains how AI is changing the nature of risk itself. While AI dramatically improves access to data and decision speed, it also amplifies exposure when data governance and access controls aren’t tightly managed. Over-permissioned systems, unstructured data repositories, and poorly governed AI knowledge bases can quickly become gateways for data theft, especially when suppliers and partners connect their own AI tools into shared workflows.

The conversation goes deeper into what Freestone calls the growing gap between operational reliability and adversarial readiness. Many organizations are focused on keeping systems running and AI models accurate, but far fewer are stress-testing their environments against hostile, AI-powered attackers. As Freestone notes, adversaries now use autonomous agents to probe supply chains continuously, exploiting complexity across second-, third-, and fourth-party relationships.

Finally, Freestone outlines what supply chain leaders should prioritize next: shifting security thinking from infrastructure-centric controls to data-centric protection, improving forensic readiness, and elevating cybersecurity discussions to the board level. This episode offers a candid look at why AI doesn’t just increase efficiency, it fundamentally raises the stakes for how supply chains manage data, trust, and risk in 2026 and beyond.

For more data from Kitework’s manufacturing report, read: Manufacturers’ AI adoption is outpacing cyber, compliance, and risk governance

Listen to the full episode today.

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