Agent Hackers Never Stop: Vincent Pilette on AI Threats and Digital Freedom

AI-powered “agent hackers” work continuously, exploit known vulnerabilities at scale, and can move money or make purchases on a consumer’s behalf before anyone notices. Vincent Pilette, CEO of Gen Digital, explains how the company behind Norton, LifeLock, and Avast is responding: platformizing its stack, acquiring MoneyLion to extend from protection into financial wellness, and building Norton Genie as a security agent that filters what autonomous AI agents are allowed to do.

Pilette traces Gen’s evolution from point products to a membership model (Norton 360 reached 65% install-base adoption within 12–18 months) and addresses the engagement paradox at the heart of consumer security: the best outcome is silence, which makes the product nearly invisible by design.

Key Highlights:

• Why 90-plus percent of consumer threats are now scams and phishing, layered on top of malware that never went away
• How agentic AI changes attack economics by exploiting previously known but ignored vulnerabilities at scale
• The customer-behavior logic behind acquiring MoneyLion: surveys showed consumers wanted Gen to move from protection to financial empowerment
• How Norton 360’s membership model reached 65% install-base adoption in 12-18 months by collapsing point products into one offer
• Why the ideal security outcome (you hear nothing) is structurally hostile to engagement, and how Gen is evolving toward an action loop that detects, verifies, and pays