Cybersecurity at the speed of AI: Supercharged AI SOC teams

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are under siege by a new wave of automated adversarial attacks. These attacks move at unprecedented speed and are difficult to detect, decode, and defend against.

With the investigation of opponents Break-in times are just two minutes and seven secondsIt is not a question of if the security operations center will be attacked, but when. and 77% Of companies have already been victims of hostile AI attacks.

For an SOC to protect itself and its corporate infrastructure, speed is critical.

Enter the AI ​​agent

Agentic AI helps security operations centers automate decision-making, adapt to evolving threats, and streamline workflows, including alert triage and incident response. It has proven to improve efficiency and enhance security by identifying risks while reducing the manual effort needed to track them.

Leading cybersecurity providers offering agentic AI solutions for security operations centers include Arcanna.ai, Cato Networks, Cisco Security Cloud, CrowdStrike (Falcon platform with Charlotte AI), Dropzone AI, Google Cloud Security AI Workbench, Microsoft Security Copilot, Nagomi Security, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.

“The speed of today’s cyberattacks requires security teams to quickly analyze massive amounts of data to detect, investigate and respond faster. “Adversaries are setting records, with compromise times of just over two minutes, leaving no room for delay,” George Kurtz, President and CEO And co-founder of the company Crowd Strikehe told VentureBeat during a recent interview.

Plan your SOC and agent AI teams to strengthen each other

For any agential AI or broader implementation of AI in SOC to be successful, a human workflow in the middle is essential. Gartner’s latest report, “Prediction 2025: There will never be an independent SoC“, reinforces VentureBeat’s observation on how SOCs are experimenting with and adopting agentic AI and broader AI applications and platforms. Gartner advises: “Security leaders and chief operations officers need to determine where human-led security operations center (SOC) functions continue and how to transition analysts Security Operations Center (SOC) to roles that require more direct human decision making.”

The report predicts that by 2026, AI will increase SOC efficiency by 40% compared to 2024 efficiency, which will begin a shift in SOC expertise toward developing, maintaining, and protecting AI.

To effectively integrate powerful AI, security operations companies need a clear framework that balances technology and human expertise. Gartner’s expanded SOC model below explains how roles, capabilities, and goals align to enhance efficiency and adaptability.

SOC challenges are an ideal use case for agentic AI

Security operations centers (SOCs) need agentic AI that matches the speed and insight of attackers if they are to have a chance of thwarting any intrusion or breach attempt.

Many SOCs are understaffed. Many also find it difficult to understand data from legacy security information and event management (SIEM) systems that lack visualization techniques or the ability to use graph databases to map threats.

The need to go beyond thinking in lists, and think more in terms of diagrams as attackers do when planning a hack, is one of many factors. Leading a powerful graph database arms race Across industry.

Striving to keep up with the influx of alerts, false positives, and constant maintenance, SOC teams face these challenges daily:

Legacy systems leave security operations companies vulnerable to increasing AI threats. Security operations centers are still burdened with legacy SIEMs, legacy endpoint detection and response (EDR), firewalls, and intrusion detection systems (IDS/IPS) that are not equipped to handle the speed and complexity of AI-driven threats. Shlomo Kramer, CEO Cato Networkshe told VentureBeat during a… The last interview“The biggest threat to organizations is the complexity of their security infrastructure. Point products create gaps in their security posture, making them prime targets for threat actors. Over the next five years, I see cyber threats evolving along three dimensions,” Kramer added. Tactically, by AI versus AI battles; operationally, by infrastructure complexity; and strategically, by geopolitical conflicts Defend against these rising threats.

Chronic alert fatigue leads to failed intrusion attempts and high employee turnover. SOC analysts struggle to keep up with thousands of alerts, false alarms, and inconsistent reports from multiple legacy SIEM and SOAR systems across their centers. IT managers report seeing up to 10,000 events per day across their operations center’s vast systems base. They wonder whether their analysts’ time would be better used to find the three or four threats that are actual threats when AI has already proven its ability to detect anomalous events.

Organizations are facing staffing shortages for key SOC roles. It is nearly impossible for many entrepreneurs to scale their SOC teams using only internal talent. While hiring from outside is always an option, SOC teams need to invest in their team’s ongoing training and career development to retain business expertise while enhancing cyber expertise.

A growing tidal wave of security data risks threatens to overwhelm security operations center teams. Kurtz echoed the severity of the challenge in a recent interview, saying, “One of the major issues in security is the data issue, which is one of the reasons I created CrowdStrike. That’s why I created the architecture that we have, and it’s very difficult for SOC teams to sort through this.” The huge amount of data and volumes to find threats.

Where agentic AI makes an impact

The most significant gains from agentic AI will come from augmenting SOC analysts and teams by automating routine tasks while giving them more sophisticated intelligence tools to learn with.

VentureBeat sees agentic AI impacting the following areas:

Achieve efficiency gains at scale for routine and repetitive tasks. AI experimental and production systems provide improved efficiencies by automating routine tasks at scale. Vasu Jackal, Vice President of Microsoft It was shared with VentureBeat in a recent interview Results of research her company completed on Security Copilot’s productivity gains. “The study showed that early-career professionals who used Security Copilot were 26% faster and 35% more accurate. Experienced professionals who used the tool were 22% faster and 7% more accurate, and 90% expressed a desire to Use it again.”

Real-time threat detection, analytics and intelligence, while also finding anomalies in massive data sets. Agentic AI applications and the platforms that support them are effective at identifying potential threats and anomalies that humans might miss. The human-in-the-loop design helps keep effective AI models constantly learning and fine-tuning their ability to identify threats.

Helping security operations centers accelerate incident response. At the core of the design of every AI application, system and platform is the ability to identify and isolate key incident response tasks in real-time to remediate threats faster. VentureBeat recently spoke with Turk CTO Eldad Livni spoke about his company’s multi-agent system, which he described as “transforming SOC operations by breaking down complex workflows into specialized, interconnected tasks handled by specialized agents. This approach ensures that every alert is accurately triaged, investigated and resolved, reducing human error.” It enables Security Operations Center teams to scale operations efficiently.

Continuous learning. Agentic AI enhances detection architecture in security operations centers (SOCs), where systems analyze large sets of threat intelligence data at scale. LLMs are trained to help security teams distinguish between real threats and false positives, providing real-time contextual insights that save SOC analysts valuable time. VentureBeat has learned that these capabilities lead to measurable improvements in threat response.

The success of Agentic’s AI depends entirely on human collaboration

“It’s not about replacing humans; “It’s about enhancing people,” Elijah said ZaitsevCrowdStrike’s CTO told VentureBeat in an interview Previous interview. “It’s about humans powered by AI, which I think is a fundamental concept… I think a lot of people work in technology — and I will say this as a CTO, I’m supposed to be focused on technology — sometimes the focus goes too far than they want In replacing humans I think this is very misleading, especially in the Internet.