5 Ways An AI Analyst Will Change How You Do SecOps

AI cyber analyst agents are driving the cost of incremental SOC monitoring to zero.  Here are 5 ways that an AI analyst will help you change the look of your security operations:

1. Less reliance on your MDR
   AI will perform your 24/7 alert analysis, replacing what is today a low ROI Tier 1 SOC provided by your MDR.  This reduced operational reliance on MDR & MSS partners will benefit both parties.  Alert triage is high-risk / low-margin work and a top point of friction between buyers and providers.  Good MDRs will pivot dollars from SOC staff augmentation to higher-value work like testing, engineering, analytics, threat hunting, incident response, and intelligence.  Buyers will insource a small number of operation staff that gain intimate knowledge of the business and can tune the AI agent more effectively to surface what’s truly important.
   

2. More ATT&CK coverage
   Organizations have long desired better detection coverage against the MITRE ATT&CK framework of adversary tactics and techniques.  Yet, the noise generated by many ATT&CK based use cases makes them operational nightmares.  Fortunately, with AI agents responsible for the volume work of alert analysis, the overhead of alert noise will no longer correlate to increased overhead.  Engineers and researchers will gain the time and the freedom to implement creative analytics that feeds alerts to the AI agents. In this reality, those east/west, impossible travel, network anomaly, DLP, and every other zany way to find potential threats are all back on the table.
   

3. MTTR measured in minutes
   Two toll gates make up 90%+ of this overall MTTR: 1) Time to generate an alert and 2) time to recognize that alert as a threat.  Both have been negatively influenced by SOC capacity constraints as the SOC can only handle so many alerts, so you slow down inbound alerts and wait for an analyst to pick them up.  AI agents eliminate this problem completely, allowing you to accelerate alerting and get near-instant analysis of threat likelihood.  The net impact is you can have analysts containing alerts in under 10 minutes, and even auto containing hosts for the most aggressive threats.
   

4. Stronger Internal Partnerships
   A cyber team is a type of internal service provider.  Everyone in an organization has a vested interest in remaining protected from cyber threats.  Yet, forging partnerships hasn’t always been easy.  The SOC has never had the bandwidth to implement bespoke application monitoring and collaborate back with the app owners to understand expected behavior.  AI agents can break down these barriers by compiling timely information from the right people, gaining fuller situational awareness at scale to make better informed decisions about which activity truly requires further investigation.
   

5. More Sleep … Z Z Z Z Z
   What keeps you up at night? Worrying that something will go wrong when you're not online.  The nights, weekends, and holiday teams are often less reliable than your 9 to 5ers, creating concern that you might be walking into some bad stuff the next day.  The consistency generated by AI agents will gain your trust, allowing you to relax more when you’re off the clock, knowing that if something pops off, it will be caught.

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