Why cybersecurity's future isn't AI vs. humans -- it's both

AI's expanding role in cybersecurity has spawned a flawed assumption among security professionals: that the industry's future is a binary choice between fully automated AI agents or human defenders, with little middle ground.

Many experts are rejecting that binary premise, pointing instead to a symbiotic model. As AI becomes more embedded in cyber defense, the relationship between people and machines is evolving into a collaborative one. AI can process vast amounts of data, identify hidden patterns and accelerate threat response. But the technology's potential is amplified by the people who guide it. Human expertise, in turn, can be extended by AI's ability to analyze information at a scale and speed no team could hope to match.

This emerging symbiosis was a central theme during a panel at the 17th annual Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C. this month, where public sector cybersecurity leaders from the U.S. and allied nations discussed how human judgment and AI-fueled analysis are elevating the capabilities of both.

Rajiv Gupta, head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, emphasized the shift, noting that introducing AI into his operation has not resulted in replacing security experts, "but really augmenting them -- a 10X, 20X, 100X type improvement."

Accelerating threat analysis

Panelists agreed that the low-hanging fruit for AI in security operations is automating  repetitive workflows. This helps analysts make sense of enormous and unwieldy volumes of data that are only getting worse as the threat landscape grows more dangerous.

"I think what's going to change in terms of the threat environment is the speed and scale at which we are now expecting and responding to cyber incidents," said Stephanie Crowe, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre Signals Directorate. "For cyber defenders, this is a new opportunity to think about different ways of working, using the opportunities that AI gives us in automated workflows, but also being able to go through large troves of data that we have to now log and monitor." 

David Imbordino, director of the NSA's Cybersecurity Directorate, added, "I think AI is giving us the opportunity to go through that volume of noise to get to the signal a lot quicker."

Imbordino views the sheer amount of data security teams are expected to analyze as a key problem but expects AI to offer a solution. "I think in the future, it will evolve to the point where the future of analysis [is AI] looking at disparate pieces of information to get to things that humans can act on much more quickly than is happening now, which can take days or weeks depending on the problem you're looking at."

Why human judgment remains essential

The panel explored the idea that not only does AI create efficiencies for security teams, but that AI becomes a much more effective tool when paired with human judgment. While AI can process more data and execute tasks at machine speed, it does not understand and interpret risks. Only human expertise can provide the context needed to distinguish high-priority threats from background noise.

CEO Richard Horne of the UK National Cyber Security Centre considers the skill and experience of cybersecurity professionals invaluable, and trains analysts to work with AI.

"One thing we're very focused on across all our agencies is how we maintain human skills and allow humans to do tasks which could be completely automated,” he said. “We actually need to be able to develop [analysts] to have the judgment that we need to be able to oversee AI effectively."

Catriona Robinson, deputy director general of New Zealand's National Cyber Security Centre, built on that point, explaining that human oversight is essential to align AI outputs with broader organizational priorities.

"Machines can't make those decisions," she said. "We've all seen examples where a tool is set a task and it finds a way to achieve that task in a way that a human would not assess as the best way to achieve that task. So, yes, we see that the AI tools amplify the impact of clever humans, but actually clever humans can amplify the impact of the machines, too."

That need for oversight becomes even more critical given AI's inherent fallibility, according to Crowe.

"We talk a lot about trusting AI. I'm not sure it's trust," she said. "I think it's building confidence in using AI because AI will make mistakes, and having the human validation component has been really important for our staff because while [AI] can identify lots of risks or new vulnerabilities, whether or not those vulnerabilities can be exploited is something that a human needs to actually validate and understand."

Members of the panel agreed that the use of AI is still very new, and teams are learning to work with it in real time.

"I think we will all discover over time that, as in any time of turbulent technology change, the ways that your people work has to change, and we're working out what cyber defense looks like in a world that is truly enabled by AI," stated Robinson. "But we're at the beginning of the journey, not the end."

Richard Livingston is an editor for TechTarget Cybersecurity, covering news, trends and analysis. Livingston's professional background includes editorial positions in the national defense industry covering the U.S. Army Medical Department, as well as offensive and defensive cyber strategy for military and government audiences.