AI Didn’t Invent Social Engineering. It Supercharged It.

**Executive summary:** Generative AI has lowered the effort required to craft convincing social engineering attacks, enabling scalable identity-based fraud that targets mobile devices, help desks, and identity recovery processes; attackers can mimic executive tone, produce synthetic audio/video, and exploit human trust and limited enterprise visibility, making traditional technical controls and authentication workflows insufficient to prevent account takeover and related fraud.