Incident Response Best Practices in an AI-Driven Risk Environment

Why Now is the Right Time to Revisit Your IR Plan

January is one of the few moments in the year when security leaders can pause without being in the middle of a fire drill. And with all workplace shifts due to AI, January is a good time to test your incident response plan.

Not because auditors expect it.

Not because a regulation says you should.

But because incident responses rarely fail due to missing tools. They fail because plans are outdated, untested, or owned by people no longer in the room.

AI adoption is accelerating, often faster than security programs can adapt. That introduces new risks and points of failure that are not accounted for in many existing IR plans (think new data flows, new dependencies, new failure modes).

If you haven’t reviewed your incident response plan recently, it is likely misaligned with how your business actually operates today.

What “Good” Incident Response Looks Like in Practice

Strong incident response is not about having an official document. It's about reducing confusion in a crisis.

The best IR programs share these traits:

• Clear ownership and decision authority

• Clear communications plans

• Realistic assumptions about people, systems, and time

• Ownership, roles and rehearsed execution, not theoretical steps

• Alignment with current business operations

  
  

Below is a practical checklist security leaders can use to pressure-test their current plan.

The Incident Response Readiness Checklist

1. Validate ownership, not just roles

Start by answering one uncomfortable question:

If an incident happens today, do we know exactly who is in charge?

Roles change. Teams change. Technology changes. Mergers/Acquisitions happen. An IR plan that names roles but not real people often breaks down immediately.

What to check:

• Named incident commander and backup

• Clear decision authority for containment and disclosure

• Updated contact details for internal leaders and external partners

• Explicit handoffs between IT, security, legal, and communications

• Offline access to plans and critical materials

If you hesitate when answering any of these, the plan is already fragile.

2. Pressure-test your assumptions about time

Many IR plans assume ideal conditions: fast detection, full staff availability, and clean data.

Real incidents rarely cooperate.

Ask yourself:

• How long would it realistically take us to confirm an incident?

• What happens if it starts at night or during a holiday?

• What decisions must be made in the first hour, not the first day?

A good test is a tabletop exercise that mimics your environment, compresses timelines and removes key people from the room. If progress stalls, you’ve got some work to do.

3. Re-evaluate data exposure in an AI-driven environment

AI changes incident response in two important ways.

First, it expands where sensitive data can live and move. Second, it complicates impact assessment when models, prompts, and training data are involved.

Your IR plan should explicitly account for:

• What sensitive data is being used by AI systems

• Whether AI tools store or retransmit that data

• How you would assess exposure if models or training datasets are compromised

• Who can explain AI-related risk to executives in plain language

Ensure your most likely threats have associated playbooks that have been reviewed and rehearsed by your response team.

If AI usage has grown faster than governance, your incident response plan is likely out of date by definition.

4. Test communication paths, not just technical steps

Incident response failures often result from poor communications.

During a real incident, people want clarity, not technical depth. They want to know what happened, why it happened, what matters, and what happens next.

Test whether your plan clearly answers these questions:

• Who briefs executive leadership and how often

• What the board expects to hear in the first update

• When should you engage external IR Team support

• When should your Cyber Insurance carrier be notified and what services do they provide

• When should legal counsel or law enforcement be engaged and why

• How external messaging is coordinated, even if it never becomes public

If you wait to “figure it out in the moment,” you will likely suffer a substantial loss.

5. Practice escalation without overreaction

One of the hardest parts of incident response is knowing when to escalate.

Overreacting creates noise, panic and credibility issues.

Underreacting creates risk and regret.

Your plan should define:

• Clear thresholds for escalation

• Who has authority to change incident severity

• When to involve outside experts

• How to de-escalate cleanly if initial indicators are wrong

This is where experience matters most. Many organizations only learn these lessons after a painful first incident.

If you test your plan regularly, you can avoid these hard lessons.

6. Test, update, then test again

A single tabletop is not enough.

Effective teams:

• Run at least one realistic tabletop per year

• Update the plan immediately based on findings

• Re-test the revised version while lessons are still fresh

• Educate your employees

The goal is not perfection. The goal is familiarity and confidence under pressure.

A Final Perspective Security Leaders Often Overlook

Incident response is not just a security function. It is a leadership function.

When something goes wrong, the organization looks to you for calm, clarity, and direction. A well-tested IR plan does not just reduce technical damage. It reduces personal risk, board scrutiny, and second-guessing when decisions are under pressure.

Reviewing your incident response plan early in the year is one of the most cost-effective risk reductions you can make, especially as AI-driven complexity increases.

When Outside Help Actually Makes Sense

Many teams try to solve incident readiness internally until they realize they are carrying risk they cannot see.

An external perspective can help when:

• You are not confident your plan reflects how the business really operates

• AI usage has outpaced security governance

• Leadership expects board-ready confidence, not technical explanations

• You want validation before a real incident provides it for you

If you want a second set of experienced eyes on your incident response readiness, the safest time to ask is before you need it.

Optional Next Step

If you want to pressure-test your incident response plan against current risks, including AI-related exposure, schedule a short working session with a security expert who has been through this before.

The goal is clarity and confidence in your ability to respond.