Global leaders and decision-makers convened at the GCF Annual Meeting 2025 in Riyadh, 1-2 October, calling for greater international collaboration on shared challenges and priorities in Cyberspace, in a time of increasingly complex socioeconomic and geopolitical dynamics.

The Global Initiative for Capacity Building in Cyberspace was announced at the Global Cybersecurity Forum (GCF) Annual Meeting 2025 in Riyadh today, as a collaboration between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Nations (UN).

Cybersecurity is undergoing a profound transformation. The acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI), the proliferation of synthetic identities, and pressures on public trust are pushing organizations into uncharted territory. In this new era, threats extend far beyond technical codes; they are structural, systemic, and deeply impactful across political, economic, and societal domains.

Cybersecurity stands at a strategic turning point—with two transformative shifts redefining the landscape. First, the rapid rise of agentic AI and autonomy is challenging long-standing assumptions about control, oversight, and threat detection. Second, cybersecurity is no longer seen solely as a defensive function—it is increasingly expected to enable business goals, innovation, and organizational agility. These shifts have exposed fundamental limitations in current performance measurement frameworks. Traditional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been built for an era of manual control and risk mitigation. But they now fail to reflect the speed, scale, and autonomy of modern digital environments. They also often overlook cybersecurity’s growing business role in enabling innovation, product integrity, regulatory trust, operational continuity, and market access. This white paper—developed by the Future of Cybersecurity Knowledge Community—offers a practical blueprint to help organizations modernize cybersecurity performance management, enabling senior leaders to adapt to next-generation AI-driven architectures and evolving business objectives