Something keeps coming up in conversations at Barden.
Businesses are spending more on cybersecurity than ever. AI-powered tooling, automated detection, new platforms promising to do in seconds what used to take a team of analysts hours. The budgets are real, and the intent is genuine.
But the gap between what the technology can do and what’s actually happening inside most organisations is wider than people think. Not because the tools don’t work. But because buying the technology and using it well are two very different things.
First, where AI is genuinely helping – because it is.
The noise problem is real.
Security teams deal with thousands of alerts every day. Most of it noise. Analyst burnout is a live issue in this industry, and it’s easy to see why. When everything looks urgent, nothing does.
AI is genuinely good at cutting through that. Spotting patterns, filtering the low-level stuff, surfacing what actually needs attention. It’s giving experienced people their focus back.
One perspective from a regulated financial services environment puts it well:
“AI is genuinely reducing the noise – and that’s not nothing. The alert fatigue burning out good security analysts is a real problem, and these tools are helping. But what I see working with regulated financial services clients is that the noise reduction doesn’t reduce the need for experienced people. It changes what those people need to be good at. The analysts who thrive alongside these tools aren’t just technically capable – they have the judgement to interpret what the AI is surfacing, and the experience to catch it when it’s incorrect. That combination is rarer than most organisations realise, and harder to hire for than a job spec suggests.” – Shane Casey, Compliance & Managed Services Manager at Infinity IT.
Speed matters too. For known threats, AI can act in seconds – containing something before it spreads, before a human has even looked at a screen.
And like we’re seeing across finance, HR, and operations – the repetitive, admin-heavy work is quietly disappearing. Reporting, compliance documentation, vulnerability scanning. The work nobody got into security to do.
But here’s the part that gets less airtime.
The technology doesn’t take sides.
The same tools being used to defend organisations are being used against them. More convincing phishing, faster targeting, more precise attacks. The threat landscape has shifted -and a lot of businesses are still catching up with what that actually means day to day.
There’s also the tooling problem. The instinct when a new threat emerges is to buy something. Vendors are very good at making that feel like the answer. But from what we’re seeing at Barden, the gap usually isn’t the technology. It’s the people alongside it. AI misses things. It can be fooled. Without someone who can question its outputs and catch it when it’s wrong, the risk doesn’t go away. It just gets harder to see.
What that means in practice
Demand for cyber talent hasn’t dropped because of AI. If anything it’s increased.
But what good looks like is shifting. Less pure technical execution, more the ability to work alongside these tools and think critically about what they’re saying. That combination is harder to find than most people expect.
Any business that’s invested heavily in AI-powered security without thinking carefully about who’s operating it is carrying more risk than they probably realise.
AI is making good security teams better. But it’s also raised the stakes on both sides. The businesses getting this right aren’t always the ones spending the most. They’re the ones who haven’t mistaken having the tools for actually using them well.
That’s the part worth paying attention to.
