In cybersecurity, standing still is the same as moving backwards. As threat actors rapidly evolve their tactics, Security Operations Centres are under constant pressure to protect critical assets with greater speed and precision.
While AI is often hyped as a catch-all solution, its most practical and immediate value is quietly unfolding in the essential area of Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response playbooks.
By automating repetitive tasks and simplifying workflows, AI is moving from a novelty to a core teammate for security analysts. This shifts the focus from managing tools to defending networks, effectively rewriting how modern security operations function.
Streamlining Playbook Creation with AI
Traditionally, building SOAR playbooks has been a manual, time-consuming task. Human analysts have to painstakingly map out workflows, connect integrations, and write logic blocks from scratch.
We are fast approaching a point where this manual engineering overhead disappears. Future large language models will be fine-tuned directly on playbook JSON data alongside natural language descriptions. Instead of building a workflow step-by-step, an analyst can simply describe what they want to achieve and let the AI generate the playbook structure. As new threats emerge at unprecedented speeds, this capability will allow defensive responses to adapt in real time, effectively shrinking deployment windows from days to seconds.
Moving to Automated, Observation-Based Suggestions
Generating a playbook from a prompt is just the first step. The real magic happens when AI transitions into an active observer within the SOC.
By monitoring daily operations, an AI agent can learn to spot the repetitive, manual actions that analysts take to triage specific alerts. Once it identifies these patterns, the system can automatically suggest playbook enhancements or new automation tracks. Crucially, the human stays in control. These optimisations are presented as options that require explicit approval from the user before going live, which eliminates engineering bottlenecks without sacrificing oversight.
Optimising Detection as Code Logic
As modern SOCs shift toward a Detection as Code model, AI’s ability to refine logic in real time will be a massive asset. This is particularly true when dealing with the industry's oldest headache of false positives.
When a SOC team triages an incident and closes it as a false positive, traditional tuning requires an analyst to manually adjust the rule to exclude that specific data point. With intelligent language models, the system can review the underlying detection rule holistically. It can suggest broader, smarter adjustments to prevent similar false positives in the future, while ensuring the logic remains tight enough that genuine, malicious incidents never slip through the cracks.
The Power of Feedback Loops and Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
AI systems are becoming significantly better at self-correction through feedback-driven learning. Instead of relying on a single, linear prompt, modern SOAR platforms allow engineering teams to link prompts together. This creates an internal critique mechanism where the AI evaluates its own output, identifies gaps or inaccuracies, and refines its response before ever presenting it to a human.
This process relies heavily on Chain-of-Thought reasoning, where a model breaks down complex problems into smaller, logical steps and interrogates its own answers along the way. While future models will have this capability baked natively into their architecture, security teams can recreate this today by chaining sequential tasks directly within their SOAR playbooks. The result is a massive leap forward in automation accuracy.
Empowering the Defensive Line
Embracing AI-powered playbooks is not about replacing human talent, but rather about elevating it. By offloading repetitive engineering and tedious alert-triage loops to AI, SOC analysts can shift their focus to deeper investigative work, threat hunting, and strategic defense.
As these technologies mature, the baseline skills of a security analyst will naturally evolve. Masterful prompt engineering and advanced investigation will become the new standard, ultimately helping Tier 1 support teams upskill faster and keeping defenders firmly one step ahead of the adversary.