What Is AI Security Risk Consulting?

Last updated: January 16, 2026

Table of Contents

• What Is AI Security Consulting?
• The Role of AI Security Threat Consulting in the Age of Generative AI
• What AI Governance Frameworks Are Essential for Risk Management?
• Key Components of AI Security Management Consulting
• How Do You Validate AI Security?
• What Makes a Great AI Security Consultant?
• Why Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Crucial for AI?
• Trava’s AI Security Consulting Services Explained
• Why AI Security Risk Consulting Should Be on Your Radar
• FAQ

Artificial intelligence has had a transformative impact across many industries. But not all of its uses are legitimate. While AI has changed how SaaS companies operate, it’s also introduced new security vulnerabilities for bad actors to exploit. You’ll need the right tools and strategies to protect your business from these evolving threats.

One way to get there is by partnering with an AI security consultant. They’re specialists who can help you identify and address security risks posed by AI systems. This can protect your brand’s reputation, help it benefit from AI tools, and create the safe foundation you’ll need to grow.

But not all experts are equally valuable. This guide will help you find the best AI security risk consulting service for your company’s unique needs.

What Is AI Security Consulting?

AI security consulting is the practice of assessing, mitigating, and managing the risks posed by artificial intelligence systems. It combines core cybersecurity principles with specialized knowledge of AI and machine learning. Cybersecurity consultants use their unique skillset to help companies:

• Find security vulnerabilities in AI tools, models, and pipelines
• Protect training data and outputs from malicious interference
• Ensure compliance with key regulations like the GDPR, NIST, and EU AI Act
• Establish internal policies and controls for safe AI use

AI tools have opened powerful new opportunities for businesses. But rushing to use these without an effective security protocol in place can be dangerous. You might use a model with a vulnerability, leak sensitive data to bad actors, or integrate AI into your workflow in a damaging way.

That’s why AI security consulting services are worth your attention. They help you safely leverage the full potential of AI. That way, your business can enter its next phase of growth without putting its brand equity at risk in the process.

The Role of AI Security Threat Consulting in the Age of Generative AI

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have hidden risks that a consultant can help you manage. These include:

• Data poisoning: Bad actors can insert malicious inputs to manipulate a model’s outputs. This can lead to your business making decisions based on bad information.
• Privacy violations: Your process could also leak sensitive data used in model training scenarios. This could violate a compliance agreement and expose your company to costly fines.
• Bias and ethics risks: Undetected biases in an AI system can lead to unintentional discrimination and reputational damage. You could even face a lawsuit in an extreme situation.
• Model exploitation: Bad actors may also be able to reverse engineer sensitive information with malicious prompt injections. This could expose your company’s trade secrets and put its points of differentiation at risk.

Security consultants can help you understand and prepare for each of these risks. They’ll make sure you can safely use LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT so you can grow without assuming unnecessary risks.

Understanding the Cost of Inaction

Security consulting services come at a cost, which means they aren’t always easy to justify in a budget. But it’s also important to consider the costs of inaction. In other words, what is your company risking by using AI without a proper security posture?

Examples include:

• Financial damages: You can lose business after a breach, and may face up to millions in fines if you’re non-compliant with key regulations.
• Operational disruption: AI-driven breaches can lead to model downtime, data loss, and forced shutdowns. This can eat into your company’s profitability, potentially significantly.
• Loss of customer trust: AI security incidents can also damage your brand’s reputation. This can lead to lost loyalty, fewer new customers, and slower growth.
• Legal consequences: Your company could also face regulatory scrutiny or a lawsuit in the wake of an AI security issue.

The average cost of a data breach in the United States is now $9.36 million. AI security consultants can protect your company from facing one of these events. This can be worth millions of dollars. So, whether you hire a consultant or not, this is a figure to keep in mind moving forward.

What AI Governance Frameworks Are Essential for Risk Management?

Two major global frameworks define AI risk management today: the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001:2023. An AI consultant can translate these high-level standards so your organization can better manage risk and prevent security vulnerabilities from becoming business liabilities. These frameworks and testing practices help organizations navigate the impact of AI on cybersecurity without slowing innovation or increasing exposure.

NIST AI Risk Management Framework

This voluntary framework can guide your business in designing, developing, using, and evaluating AI products, services, and systems with risk management in mind. The global NIST AI Risk Management Framework was “designed to equip organizations and individuals with approaches that increase the trustworthiness of AI systems, and to help foster the responsible design, development, deployment, and use of AI systems over time.” It serves as a practical and adaptable response to the use of AI technology across industries.

The benefits of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework include:

• Enhancing your organization’s processes for governing and managing AI risk while clearly documenting related outcomes.
• Establishing clearer policies and procedures that strengthen AI-related accountability.
• Improving information sharing within your organization and across your industry.
• Bolstering your company’s security culture by embedding AI risk management into day-to-day practices.

The NIST framework can guide your business in improving its use of artificial intelligence to systematically manage risks. It emphasizes the need for accountability, transparency, and ethical behavior in both AI development and deployment.

ISO/IEC 42001:2023

The other major AI risk management framework that businesses use is ISO/IEC 42001:2023. The International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) jointly developed this standard as a global benchmark for responsible AI use.

Organizations of all sizes can follow this international standard to responsibly develop and use AI systems. As the world’s first AI management system standard, it covers ethical considerations, transparency, and continuous learning to help organizations “balance innovation with governance.” The goal is to provide a structured way to manage both the risks and the opportunities that come with artificial intelligence. 

As a reliable framework for managing risk and opportunities, ISO/IEC 42001:2023 can lead to both cost savings and efficiency gains while delivering on traceability and transparency. It’s designed to be flexible and applicable across various AI applications and contexts, no matter the size of your business.

As the need for cybersecurity to thwart malicious actors and systems grows, compliance is more critical than ever for businesses. Your organization can pursue an ISO 42001 AI certification to establish a responsible, secure ISO 42001 AI framework throughout your business and maintain regulatory compliance.

If your business hasn’t already integrated these two key AI governance frameworks or if you have questions about how they might impact your overall security posture, an AI cybersecurity consultant can work with you to take the next steps.

Key Components of AI Security Management Consulting

So, what kind of support will you get from an AI consultant? It can vary based on your organizational needs. However, consultants often help businesses with:

• Risk governance and strategy: Aligning your company’s use of AI with corporate risk policies. For example, limiting the maximum financial risk of using an LLM by creating safe use standards for employees.
• Regulatory framework integration: You may want to adopt something like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to make your company stand out to potential partners. A consultant can help your company change in whatever ways it needs to earn the certification.
• Monitoring and detection: Consultants can also design or implement tools for detecting suspicious behavior. This can help you catch rare generative AI issues before they have the chance to impact your business.
• Model testing: Security consultants can also test your model to see how it performs in different scenarios. This helps you find and solve edge cases that an adversary may try to exploit.
• Data security and privacy: Finally, consultants can apply encryption, anonymize data, and bring more user privacy to your AI system. This can help you avoid fines and keep users happy.

You may want help in all of these areas or just a few. Either way, Trava has you covered with bespoke AI risk management services designed around your unique needs.

Empower your organization to navigate the complexities of AI risks with confidence. Click to get help spotting, tackling, and dodging any potential risks that come your way.

How Do You Validate AI Security?

Skilled consultants should do more than help create cybersecurity polices and integrate governance frameworks. Policy is important, but it can’t prove your AI system behaves safely under real-world pressure. The right cybersecurity consultants also validate the security of the model itself through hands-on, specialized testing. 

That’s where AI penetration testing comes in. An AI penetration tester simulates how attackers actually target AI-enabled applications by probing the model, its data flows, and the surrounding controls to uncover weaknesses before they become incidents. 

AI-powered penetration testing goes a step further by using automation to accelerate discovery and expand coverage, while still relying on expert review to interpret results and prioritize fixes. Using AI in penetration testing can increase the speed and frequency of tests to validate how your system responds to adversarial behavior under a variety of circumstances.

How does AI penetration testing differ from standard security audits?

Using AI for penetration testing differs from a standard security audit. Traditional security audits and network tests focus on confirming the functions of the infrastructure: endpoints, configurations, identity controls, patching, segmentation, and known software vulnerabilities.

AI-powered penetration testing, on the other hand, examines the unique attack surface created by models and their integrations, simulating scenarios in which attackers can manipulate the system’s logic even when the underlying network is well protected.

A proactive AI penetration tester tests for AI-specific attack vectors:

• Direct prompt injection and indirect prompt injection: Direct prompt injection hijacks your AI by overriding developer instructions, while indirect prompt injection hides these commands in external data, such as documents or websites, that AI processes. Both direct and indirect prompt injection can lead to data leaks, misinformation, scam emails, and other security threats to your business. 
• Data poisoning: This type of cyberattack occurs when a bad actor corrupts your training data by injecting false, misleading, or altered information to manipulate its behavior or performance, or to create bias. Data poisoning occurs during training or fine-tuning and can prevent the detection of malware or cause a model to perform malicious actions. 
• Model extraction and inversion: Model extraction steals intellectual property from a model and creates a shadow version of it. Model inversion is when an attacker reverse-engineers a model to extract sensitive information from it. Both can reveal your company’s security vulnerabilities and leak sensitive data.
• Insecure tool and function calls: If AI agents are granted overly broad permissions on your systems, it can lead to insecure code, vulnerability to manipulation, or the tool being used as a proxy to execute malicious actions.
• Data leakage through retrieval pipelines and logging: These security vulnerabilities in AI applications happen when sensitive information is unintentionally exposed to unauthorized parties or systems due to system misconfigurations, weak access controls, or malicious inputs. 

These are all model-level weaknesses (i.e., issues in how an AI system learns, reasons, and interacts with data and tools) that generally don’t show up in a standard infrastructure audit. A skilled penetration testing consultant brings the specialized expertise to design realistic abuse scenarios based on how your AI features are actually used, then turns the results into clear business impact and prioritized fixes your team can implement. 

When you better understand the technical vulnerabilities specific to artificial intelligence and machine learning models, it’s easier to recognize and validate your business’s overall security. Ultimately, policy alone is insufficient when it comes to the use of AI in cybersecurity. Balancing the risks and capabilities of this technology can be a high-wire act, and sophisticated models require specialized testing to validate security.

What Makes a Great AI Security Consultant?

AI has a lot of hype right now, and you’ll find no shortage of security professionals trying to cash in. That’s why it’s crucial to look carefully for an AI security consultant. You want to make sure you hire someone who truly specializes in the field, not an opportunist trying to make a quick buck.

Following this process will help you avoid the fakes and find the right fit for your team.

Practical Skills

First, AI security consultants have practical expertise at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. That often includes:

• Model evaluation and threat analysis: The ability to audit models for vulnerabilities, bias, and risk. Consultants should know how to probe LLMs for weaknesses, where to look for them, and how to fix any issues spotted.
• AI-specific risk modeling: You also want a consultant who can apply AI-specific threat models, not just general cybersecurity ones. This will allow them to provide more tailored assessments based on the unique risks posed by artificial intelligence.
• Security automation and monitoring: Look for experts who can monitor AI behavior in production, looking for model drift, abuse patterns, and policy violations, among other factors.
• Secure integrations: Your consultant should also know how to integrate AI and machine learning tools with other platforms without increasing risk in the process.
• AI-based data privacy: Finally, look for consultants who have specialized skills in data privacy for AI systems. That could mean asking about a consultant’s experience with federated learning or homomorphic encryption, among other specialized topics.

The Right Background and Credentials

Skills aren’t always easy to measure in an interview setting. That’s why it’s also worth asking potential consultants about their background and credentials. 

For example, you may want to hire a consultant with a degree in data science, machine learning, or AI research. This would be a good sign that they have sufficient background knowledge to support your company.

It’s also worth asking consultants about any cybersecurity certifications they have. Some of the most useful for this kind of work include:

• CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional)
• CCSP (Certified Cloud Security Professional)
• OSCP (Offensive Security Certified Professional)

Finally, focus on groups that have experience helping companies reach AI framework standards. This shows they can help your business do the same. But doesn’t guarantee it. So, consider asking for case studies and sample deliverables like threat models or policy frameworks before signing any contracts.

An Integrated Approach

Another factor to consider is that your AI security policy won’t exist in a vacuum. It’ll likely intersect with other tools, people, and frameworks. The best AI consultants understand this and use a holistic approach to create seamless strategies that work for every department.

For example, they might help your legal and executive teams document a set of AI standards. Or they could work with your engineering group to make sure any AI restrictions won’t impact their ability to innovate. This kind of integrated approach will help you avoid common issues and get value from AI systems sooner.

So, look for consultants who value integration as much as your business does. You can figure this out by asking candidates about their approach to cross-department AI integrations. If they struggle to answer your questions or can’t think of an effective example, it may be time to look elsewhere.

Questions To Ask Candidates

Now, you know what to look for in an AI security consultant. But you’ll need to ask the right interview questions to get the information you need to make a hiring decision. These sample questions are a great place to start:

• What types of AI systems have you secured and in what industries?
• How do you assess the risk of an AI system during development and after deployment?
• What compliance frameworks have you helped other companies reach?
• Do you have sample AI security policies or governance plans you’ve written that we can review?
• How do you collaborate with internal teams?
• What visibility will we have into the risks you identify once our contract ends?

Watch out for generalized answers, vague examples, and unfamiliarity with key AI laws and frameworks. These are common signs you’re talking to a standard cybersecurity consultant instead of one who truly specializes in AI.

Check out our guide on navigating the impact of AI in cybersecurity for more context on why hiring a consultant with this specialized knowledge matters.

Why Is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Crucial for AI?

Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a five-phase security program that identifies and prioritizes security exposures, then mitigates them in real time. Where point-in-time, once-a-year audits fall behind, CTEM enables faster security decisions. 

With AI models evolving quickly and concept drift changing user behavior over time, your security has to continuously adapt to avoid putting your business at risk. CTEM addresses threats related to artificial intelligence, provides continuous visibility, and prioritizes risk, using AI itself to discover specific threats and vulnerabilities. The five phases are:

1. Scoping: This foundational stage involves identifying mission-critical priorities and defining key objectives.
2. Discovery: Your organization maps your entire IT ecosystem to look for exposures and vulnerabilities.
3. Prioritization: Rank risks based on business impact and decide what to address first.
4. Validation: Determine which exposures are relevant as well as the security controls to mitigate them.
5. Mobilization: This is the time to turn the previous stages into action, including remediation and tracking, with a focus on continuous progress.

It’s vital to connect testing services, such as Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), to your organization’s larger, ongoing strategic security processes. Your organization’s CTEM framework should incorporate CTEM as a service and penetration test as a service to move from reactive security to a proactive process that continuously finds and reduces exposure. 

Handled correctly, CTEM applies AI for business security, improving incident response speed and strengthening overall resilience and readiness, even as AI risks shift and evolve.

An experienced cybersecurity risk management consultant can work with your business to integrate CTEM, AI models, and other security protocols and services to support cybersecurity awareness and protect your data, facilitating safe, secure business operations.

Trava’s AI Security Consulting Services Explained

If you’re ready to revamp your company’s AI security posture, consider consulting services from Trava. Our experts can meet your organization wherever it is today and help it move toward its goal. We can support you with:

• AI risk assessments: We’ll evaluate how exposed your organization is to AI risk, locate any vulnerabilities, and help you make the necessary changes based on your risk tolerance.
• AI framework compliance: Our team can help you meet the criteria of key cybersecurity standards like the NIST AI Risk Management framework.
• Policy creation: We can help you draft internal security policies for AI, helping you meet various framework criteria, if that’s your goal.
• Compliance consulting: We offer ongoing consulting services to help companies understand and respond to new regulations, threats, and tools.

Whether you need all of these services or only a few, our flexible plans make it easy to get the exact type of support your business needs to move forward.

Why AI Security Risk Consulting Should Be on Your Radar

AI tools have opened new possibilities for businesses and bad actors alike. The question for your company is how to leverage the technology to unlock its benefits without assuming new risks. One of the best ways is to work with an AI security risk consultant.

These experts can help you protect sensitive data, ensure ethical AI use, and stay compliant in a fast-evolving regulatory landscape. It could be just what you need to step into your next era of growth. But don’t take our word for it. Check out the resources below to learn more about AI security risk consulting from Trava.

• Explore Trava’s AI Security Services
• Book a Free Consultation
• Dive deeper into continuous cybersecurity monitoring

FAQ

What the key components of AI security consulting?

AI security consultants find security vulnerabilities in AI tools and models, protecting data from interference, ensure compliance, and establish internal policies for safe AI use.

Why should my small business be concerned about cybersecurity threats?

Cybersecurity threats have become so costly to businesses due to a hefty combination of legal fees, data recovery costs, reduced employee productivity, and other serious factors that take a toll on finances, operations, and business reputation.

What are the best methods to prevent cyber attacks?

AI governance frameworks and Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) can support your business’s cybersecurity risk management. In addition, risk assessment practices and checkups can spot potential issues before they become a million-dollar problem. 

Sources

1. Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025. (2025). IBM.