AI enables more complex cyberattacks more often. Are cyber security teams up to the challenge? Can they leverage AI for cyber defense or will AI obsolete human expertise altogether? A highly contested debate to come out of this question is what role artificial intelligence (AI) can play in fortifying digital defense. Will cybersecurity be replaced by AI, leaving human expertise obsolete? Or is AI just the latest buzzword everyone’s “gotta have”?

There is a lot going on with AI and security. This article is not about securing your company against AI and safeguarding your company from AI taking your data. There are plenty of folks talking about this, but we’re not here to chat about it. Currently it is more intellectual than practical. We’re here to talk about using AI to get your job done as a security professional.

Sure, AI can be added to any product these days and AI can do many tasks for you. The real impact will come from practical applications of AI that can be used to empower cybersecurity teams to maximize their capacity and effectiveness. Yes, AI can answer questions for you like a Google search, but the real power is when it can be proactive and guide you on what to do before you ever have questions. 

While many companies are adding skin-deep AI features that offer little help, solutions designed with AI at their core can dramatically improve the operational capacity and effectiveness of cybersecurity teams. For proof of this, look no further than how it’s helped attackers. Defenders should feel empowered to leverage the same technology without the fear of being replaced. Let’s delve into how.

The Rise of AI in Cybersecurity

With the tsunami of cyber threats emerging today, artificial intelligence is a no-brainer ally in the fight against cyber threats. AI technologies have already begun revolutionizing cybersecurity by analyzing vast amounts of data and discovering suspicious patterns.

Practical applications of AI that likely impact your day-to-day work include threat detection, vulnerability management response, and risk assessment.

AI as a Force Multiplier for Cyber Defense Teams

Contrary to the fear that AI will replace human cybersecurity experts, AI operates at its best as a force multiplier to augment the capabilities of cybersecurity teams , and enable them to achieve more with less.

AI is here to make all of our jobs easier and everyone wants to use it for cybersecurity. There are ways to use it and there are things that you should avoid. Two things to consider as you’re evaluating AI for your organization. 

1. Look for products that don’t run on your infrastructure. You want something lightweight. Putting AI on your endpoint is a recipe for a repeat of the 2024 CrowdStrike incident. 

2. Avoid AI that publicly uses your data. You want a private and secure AI experience where AI doesn’t train on your data. 

It is critical to differentiate cybersecurity companies that merely use AI generically, from companies with specialized AI that specifically targets cyberthreats. There is a major difference between superficially capitalizing off the AI trend versus delivering high impact results with specialty AI built for cybersecurity purposes, but you must often look past outward appearances to see the difference.

Here are some practical use cases of specialty AI for cybersecurity that actually maximize team capacity and effectiveness:

1. Automated Threat Detection: Specialty predictive AI can continuously monitor open source threat intelligence such as forums, feeds, and blogs to identify potential threats to companies in real-time. This automated threat detection significantly reduces the burden on human analysts, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.

2. Threat prioritization: Specialty AI can match threat alerts on existing EDR or vulnerability tools to the threat landscape. This is based on what is most active or severe and allows human defenders to mitigate potential damage to their environment by working on the right threats at the right time in advance of an actual exploit attempt

3. Mitigation strategies: Specialty AI can propose mitigation strategies using generative artificial intelligence. The AI system will scan open source threat intelligence to learn about different defense strategies and with the oversight of human expertise generate personalized advice for each company. This saves significant time on incident response.

4. Instant threat intelligence: Specialty AI can save defenders time trying to find relevant threat intelligence by scouring the data in the open source threat intelligence community and using natural language processing and machine learning to give instant answers about threats.

Note: Learn more about these AI cybersecurity capabilities here 

Takeaway: The Human-AI Partnership in Cybersecurity

While AI offers unprecedented capabilities in cybersecurity, it's essential to recognize that human expertise remains irreplaceable. Cybersecurity professionals bring critical thinking, domain knowledge, and contextual understanding to the table, complementing the analytical prowess of AI systems and  filling in the gaps that AI cannot (it doesn’t even know about them). 

On top of that, humans are crucial for constantly verifying and improving artificial intelligence so it can be a reliable ally in the fight against cyber threats.

The most effective cybersecurity strategies leverage the synergy between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, finally allowing companies to stay one step ahead of cyber attackers. So in short? No. Cybersecurity teams cannot be replaced by AI. The best and most effective teams will leverage specialized cyberthreat AI to their advantage.

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