The continued evolution of artificial intelligence is going to “fuel a surge of new AI driven roles,” and “every new job that's created by AI is going to require a baseline of AI and cybersecurity literacy,” Sysdig CFO Karen Walker said.
“There's a lot of considerations around security of data, just the overall AI pipeline, so I think it poses a new challenge for companies and their employee base on just being able to have a certain level of AI and cybersecurity literacy,” Walker told CFO Dive in an interview.
From investment to enablement
It’s important for CFOs and their fellows in the C-suite to keep a close eye on how AI’s integration into their businesses could change the way their companies operate, Walker said.
“Companies are definitely trying to embrace this, but how do they do it safely, and make sure that all their use cases are secure?” she said of how leadership is thinking about integrating AI into their workflows. That includes both carefully choosing which AI tools — out of an expanding list — to invest in and then, crucially, ensuring one’s employees have that baseline level of competence when it comes to how to securely use AI, she said.
Walker has served as finance chief for the San Francisco-based computer and network security firm since 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile. Prior to Sysdig, she served as CFO for mid-stage tech company Bungalow, and her previous roles include serving as SVP of finance for PagerDuty and as VP, chief accounting officer and treasurer for Pandora.
The need to come up with an effective and secure game plan for AI’s usage comes as the AI industry itself continues to expand. This creates more choice and more competition for businesses that are eying the technology’s potential.
A growing fear of “missing out” on AI prompted a surge in mergers and acquisitions last year, for instance. CFO Dive previously reported that the aggregate value of AI-driven M&A deals in the U.S. reaching $107.9 billion in 2025 — a 9.7% year-over-year change and an 80% jump from 2022 levels.
Picks and shovels
The 2026 M&A landscape is “off to a strong start, and has all the signs of continuing at the same clip,” Walker said.
“A lot of the companies that flooded the market with point solutions, I think many of those will have the opportunity to be acquired,” she said.
When it comes to AI companies, today’s investors are somewhat conflicted, she said — the “growth at all costs” mandate that fueled technology investments in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic has mellowed in recent years, with the pendulum swinging some back to profitability.
AI behemoth OpenAI, for example, completed its shift to a for-profit entity in October — leaving Microsoft with a 27% stake in the ChatGPT maker, as well as rights to its AI models through 2032 — and still faces heightened scrutiny from industry experts and leaders.
While AI technology isn’t likely to fade away any time soon, the question of how to best structure the business model for an AI company remains open-ended, according to Walker. As such, today's investors are “looking a little bit more closely at fundamentals, but probably not with the same lens as they are for other industries,” Walker said. They’re asking what about an AI-first company’s technology makes it competitive: if it’s “just a wrapper around a chatbot,” or the company doesn’t have its own intellectual property or differentiated data at this point, it’s not compelling for investors, she said.
Walker sees investors flocking to companies that craft the infrastructure to support AI, she said.
“I like to think of them as, if we're in a gold rush, these are the folks that are making the shovels and the picks,” she said. “They don't have to necessarily bet on what large language model is going to be a winner, or kind of what that market share looks like.”
