Mike Armistead Discusses Why We Shouldn’t Fear Our New AI Overlords

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My guest on the Inner Circle podcast this week is Mike Armistead, co-founder and CEO of Respond Software. We talked about artificial intelligence (AI) and the increasingly important role that AI and machine learning (ML) play–particularly when it comes to cybersecurity and the security operations center (SOC).

We all know that robot overlords powered by artificial intelligence (AI) will one day rule the world and subjugate humanity, right? I mean, I’ve watched the Terminator movies. I’ve also seen the YouTube clips of robots developed by Boston Dynamics and I am familiar with the concept of the singularity. It’s only a matter of time, really.

OK. That day may or may not come, but it’s a long way off regardless. The bigger fear today is simply, “Will an AI steal my job?” However, according to Armistead, the more relevant question right now is, “Can I truly trust the AI to do the job I’ve assigned it?”

AI is not perfect. The functionality and value of an AI is determined both by the quality and volume of the data that is fed into the ML algorithms, and by the coding logic applied to that data. Having a ton of data and an AI is not an automatic recipe for success–it has to be the right data, analyzed in the right way in order to generate useful output.

Armistead and I talked about the role of AI in cybersecurity and the value it has in a SOC environment. Manual processes simply can’t keep up with the sheer volume of threats, especially in a vast, dynamic environment like containers in the cloud. AI is crucial in that scenario because it can process exponentially more data in a fraction of the time, and correlate it with previous incidents and data to quickly identify suspicious or malicious activity that deserves more attention. The AI acts as the Level 1 SOC analyst so the human beings can focus only on the issues that are relevant.

All of that assumes the AI is properly tuned, though–and that is an ongoing process. Listen to this episode of the Inner Circle podcast to learn more and share your thoughts in the comments below.