By Byron V. Acohido

SAN FRANCISCO — RSAC 2025 kicks off today at Moscone Center, with more than 40,000 cybersecurity pros, tech executives, and policy leaders gathering to chart the future of digital risk management.

Related: RSAC 2025’s full agenda

One dominant undercurrent is already clear: GenAI isn’t coming. It’s here — embedded in enterprise security architectures, compliance tools, risk models, employee workflows.

Yet as the conference opens, it feels like we’re crossing an even bigger threshold — not just a new technological frontier, but a familiar historical tension line.

Last week, Microsoft published its 2025 Work Trend Index, boldly declaring the rise of the “frontier firm”: a new corporate species where GenAI teammates empower humans to move faster, think bigger, and shape strategy at every level. “Humans remain in charge,” the report emphasizes. GenAI, it assures us, will not replace us — it will elevate us.

Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s latest shareholder letter frames Alexa+ and Amazon’s expanding GenAI stack as the next great leap forward. Jassy proudly details Amazon’s “Why” culture — relentlessly asking why services can’t be faster, broader, smarter — now turbocharged by generative AI models.

Transformative tech

At first glance, these visions are thrilling. They sketch a future in which human potential expands exponentially — guided, but not governed, by AI.

But if you squint — if you apply the historical lens I explored in my previous column — a more complicated picture comes into focus.

Over the past 500 years, every transformative technology has followed a pattern: the Gutenberg press, the steam engine, the transistor, the early internet. Each began as a force for democratization, promising to break monopolies and lift all boats. And each, in time, became consolidated — captured by a handful of powerful entities who redefined the rails of commerce, information, and social order.

Today, Microsoft’s “humans in charge” messaging and Amazon’s customer-centric narrative echo the early optimism of past revolutions. But the underlying incentives remain: scale fast, capture markets, define standards — and control distribution.

Even Microsoft’s report hints at it: frontier firms aren’t just adopting GenAI — they’re building proprietary ecosystems, integrated from data ingestion to decision-making. Meanwhile, Jassy’s letter openly celebrates how Amazon’s custom AI chips (Trainium2), proprietary foundation models (Nova), and commercial cloud services (Bedrock, SageMaker) are reshaping entire industries.

Unmistakable tension lines

Are we witnessing GenAI opening up new frontiers of human agency? Or are we simply speeding through the old cycle again — faster, shinier, wrapped in the velvet glove of personalization?

And yet, there are reasons to hope this time could be different.

The open-source LLM movement — led by platforms like Hugging Face, Mistral, and Stability AI — continues to gain ground. Individual creators are building local models to bypass platform gatekeepers. Nonprofits and civic technologists are adapting open-source AI for transparency, education, and grassroots activism. Small businesses are fine-tuning lightweight models for hyperlocal needs — like my dentist, Dr. Melissa Ilgen, who now uses AI to manage patient records more efficiently.

Meanwhile, inside RSAC’s vendor showcases, a quieter shift is underway. Decentralized approaches to model fine-tuning, data ownership, and explainable AI are moving from theory to product roadmaps. And while regulatory frameworks remain slow and uneven, they are taking shape earlier in this cycle than they did during the rise of the web or mobile ecosystems.

Countering forces

In short: for the first time, a critical mass of technologists, regulators, and even users are aware — viscerally aware — of the stakes.

This week at RSAC, I’ll be seeking out the voices on the front lines: the architects, the innovators, the skeptical realists. Those navigating the tension between building responsibly — and racing to survive in an industry where velocity and enclosure remain powerful forces.

The question at the heart of this moment is not whether GenAI will change the game. It already has.

The question is whether we — collectively — will change the rules this time.

Stay tuned. I’ll keep watch – and keep reporting.

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(Editor’s note: A machine assisted in creating this content. I used ChatGPT-4o to accelerate research, to scale correlations, to distill complex observations and to tighten structure, grammar, and syntax. The analysis and conclusions are entirely my own—drawn from lived experience and editorial judgment honed over decades of investigative reporting.)

April 28th, 2025