How AI Is Changing Roles in the Security Operations Center

Summary

Rapid7 discusses how AI may shift SOC analysts from alert triage to case ownership and response, increase the need for security operations engineers, and make exposure management a continuous function.

Key points

• AI is increasingly handling SOC enrichment, correlation, and initial assessment, prompting leaders to rethink analyst roles and performance measures.
• Gartner recommends measuring SOC work by cases and decisions rather than alert volume, with analysts owning cases and communicating response options.
• Rapid7 says its agentic SOC workflows save more than 200 analyst hours weekly and achieve 99.93% accuracy in benign dispositions.
• The article argues that human analysts should validate AI conclusions and make decisions with operational consequences.
• Gartner projects 50% more engineers than analysts in security operations teams by 2028 and recommends expanding detection engineering to include prompt design, workflow testing, and AI-output validation.
• The article presents exposure management as a continuous SOC function linking discovery and remediation with detection and response.

People

Vendors

Products