Our industry has started treating “AI” and “automation” as synonyms, and that conflation is one of the most dangerous mistakes we’re making right now. Automation will absolutely play a critical role in modernizing security operations — for enrichment, correlation and triaging the well-understood, high-volume work that machines genuinely do better than people. But automation is not a replacement for judgment, and AI is not a license to take humans out of the loop.
It’s also not a quick-fix cost saver. Conventional wisdom still believes that replacing humans with AI will drastically reduce costs, but tech leaders are sounding the alarm to the contrary. Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning sent shockwaves through the tech sector in April when he told Axios that “the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees” for his team. And The Information reported that Uber’s CTO blew through his full 2026 AI budget by the end of April.
What actually happens when you remove the human
Pull humans out of the decision-making, and four things start to compound.
First, you reinforce a bad process. Every alert closed without human review is a data point telling the system “This was fine.” If the model was wrong, you’ve now baked that error into the loop. Wrong once becomes wrong at scale, and the problem grows tenfold before anyone notices.