AI and Human Expertise: A Key Alliance in Cybersecurity

While many cybersecurity tasks - like log monitoring, event correlation, or alert classification - are repetitive and operational, they can be exhausting for professionals in the field. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key enabler for automating processes, reducing false positives, and optimizing incident prioritization. However, this does not mean cybersecurity can do without essential human abilities such as creativity and critical thinking.

As threat actors devise new approaches to infiltrate organizations, human capabilities provide a broader perspective, enabling analysts to interpret historical data or locate key information needed to resolve an incident. Functions like threat hunting or interpreting anomalous patterns require technical skills, analytical judgment, and situational awareness. This is why organizations that integrate AI with human capabilities can build better, resilient cybersecurity models, a hybrid approach that allows them to anticipate, detect, and respond effectively.

The Role of Human Expertise in the AI Era

There’s no doubt that threat detection and response have significantly improved with AI algorithms, which help organizations stay protected. AI elevates cybersecurity by improving:

• Anomaly Detection: AI identifies abnormal behaviors in large data set, revealing potential threats that human analysts might overlook.
• Automated Triage and Alert Prioritization: AI automates triage by assessing factors such as the threat’s origin, its potential impact, and the organization’s critical operations, prioritizing incidents based on real risk levels. This reduces the burden on security teams, allowing them to focus immediately on critical incidents.
• Automated Responses: AI systems can automate responses to common threats, reducing response times and freeing analysts to handle more complex incidents.

Despite these enhancements, AI is limited by the data it processes. It cannot often justify its decisions or consider broader business risks and strategies. 

Unlike human judgment, AI is designed to optimize outcomes without ethical reasoning. This is precisely why human capabilities remain essential in areas such as:

• Intuitive Decision-Making: Experience allows analysts to respond intuitively and knowledgeably to ambiguous threat scenarios.
• Contextual Understanding: Experts can grasp the broader context of security events and analyze data with a level of nuance and detail that AI has yet to match.
• Ethical Judgment: Decision-making must consider ethical principles and legal standards, which requires human judgment to ensure AI operates within acceptable boundaries.

When it comes to threat hunting and incident response, organizations must be cautious about deploying AI. Unsupervised, autonomous AI models can lead to inefficient resource allocation, biased analysis, or misinterpretations of the threat landscape, ultimately harming cybersecurity operations. The actual value of AI lies in acting as an extension of human expertise. Its ability to process vast amounts of data is best leveraged with the intuition, ethical judgment, and contextual understanding only security professionals can offer.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) helps businesses, MSPs, and even some MSSPs strengthen their cybersecurity by offloading 24/7 threat detection, investigation, and response to a specialized team. They combine the speed and accuracy of AI with the expertise of seasoned threat hunters who can detect subtle signals that automated systems may miss. Since MDR is an external service, organizations and MSPs can access these advanced capabilities, removing the need to invest in costly internal resources. This makes threat hunting more accurate, strategic, and aligned to the real-world context of each environment.

If you want to learn more about MDR and how it can enhance the security of your organization and your customers, check out the following posts on our blog:

• MDR for MSPs: the key to strengthening your portfolio and protecting your customers
• 4 Key Cybersecurity Challenges Businesses Face, Is MDR the Solution?
• DR Guide for Humans: Keys to Understanding MDR, EDR, NDR, XDR
• The Reseller Shift to Managed Services: Where to Start and Why It Matters
• Get More from Defender with WatchGuard Core MDR for Microsoft