The promise of AI in cybersecurity has stirred excitement and skepticism. There’s no shortage of claims that AI will revolutionize Security Operations Centers (SOCs), streamline threat investigations, and eliminate alert fatigue.
But for security leaders tasked with delivering measurable outcomes, the real question is this: how do you operationalize AI responsibly and with accountability, without losing what matters most – context, control, and human expertise?
At eSentire, we’ve been answering that question not with press releases or beta launches, but with actual production-ready implementation of eSentire Atlas Expert AI that is fully embedded in our platform. For us, AI isn’t a new add-on; it’s a foundational capability woven into the way our SOC operates today.
And here’s what we’ve learned: AI works best not as a decision-maker, but as a force multiplier – accelerating how our SOC Cyber Analysts analyze security incidents, elevating case quality, and increasing operational resilience.
But none of it works without one essential principle: the human stays in the loop. Always.
In this blog, we’ll unpack three use cases that demonstrate how AI is reshaping day-to-day SecOps – not by replacing SOC Cyber Analysts, but by making them faster, more accurate, and better informed from the moment a signal hits the dashboard.
Use Case #1: Accelerating and Augmenting SOC Investigations
Triage is one of the most mentally demanding stages of a threat investigation. Once a signal is triggered, SOC Cyber Analysts don’t just follow a checklist. They form hypotheses, test assumptions, correlate data, and dig through context that may or may not lead to an actionable threat. But when that workflow repeats dozens of times per shift, even the best-trained Analysts can start experience analyst fatigue, especially when sifting through repetitive signals and datasets.
That’s where our AI augmentation capabilities step in. eSentire’s AI augmentation layer sits on top of the SOC workbench, analyzing historical analyst behavior, prior case knowledge, relevant contextual telemetry and current evidence to suggest hypotheses with confidence scores.
In doing so, the eSentire Atlas Expert AI isn’t there to take over the decision – it’s there to give our team of SOC Cyber Analysts a sharper starting point in threat investigations.
As a result, our threat investigations don’t begin with uncertainty, but with insight. Analysts still drive the process, but now they save critical time, spend less time on routine checks and more time on high-value decision-making, and reduce burnout.
The overall impact means your organization benefits from a tighter feedback loop, better prioritization, and a meaningful reduction in time-to-triage across the board.
Use Case #2: Kickstarting Pre-Investigations with Agentic AI
When threat signals stack up, even the most seasoned SOC Cyber Analysts spend too much time on the mechanical parts of a threat investigation – pivoting across tools, querying datasets, and executing repeatable lookups.
Although this is essential work, it can be especially draining for Analysts. What’s more, the more time they spend re-running the same workflows, the less time they have to focus on what matters most: interpreting the results and actioning response on them.
eSentire Atlas Expert AI in the platform gets to work the moment a signal is generated. Using the same tools and logic flows a human analyst would, the Atlas Expert AI launches a full pre-investigation on its own.
It parses command lines, examines user activity, correlates IP data, and compiles the findings into a readable, actionable summary in natural language. In other words, this isn’t just automation; its contextual reasoning built on years of operational data and analyst behavior.
By the time a SOC Cyber Analyst opens the case, they’re jumping in at a pivotal moment of a threat investigation during which they can analyze the evidence collected by the AI and decide whether they want to escalate the investigation or close it out. This means the critical human judgment that drives escalation or containment happens faster.
Use Case #3: Conducting Real-time SOC Audits for Case Escalation
There’s a hidden risk in fast-moving SOC environments: case quality. Even the best SOC Cyber Analysts can submit escalations that lack clarity, context, or concrete remediation guidance under pressure. And for customers receiving those reports, ambiguity isn’t just frustrating; it can mean delayed response or missed containment windows.
To ensure every case that leaves our SOC reflects the standard we hold ourselves to, we’ve built an AI Auditor that reviews escalations before they’re delivered. It checks the supporting logic, flags gaps in evidence, and evaluates whether the remediation advice is clear and actionable. Essentially, it’s a quality assurance gate that enhances consistency across our teams and reinforces the credibility of the threat investigation.
The benefit to security leaders is simple: greater trust in every action our SOC takes on your behalf. Every case is vetted, not just by a human analyst, but by AI trained on thousands of prior investigations, tuned to identify weak points and suggest improvements.
That means faster downstream response, stronger communications, and fewer follow-up questions – because the work is clear from the start.
GUIDE
AI Fact or Fiction: 10 Questions to Ask MDR Providers About Their AI Capabilities
DOWNLOAD NOW
Bottom Line: It’s Not AI vs. Human Analysts; It’s AI with Analysts, By Design
There’s no shortage of AI promises in cybersecurity: faster response, reduced repetitive tasks, increased time-to-value. Behind the glossy dashboards and automation promises, many solutions fail to deliver real outcomes during security incidents.
That’s not how we’ve built it at eSentire.
Our approach to AI has always been grounded in operational reality – built by experts, trained on actual investigations, and embedded into the workflows our SOC runs every day.
Let me be clear: It’s not there to replace the analyst. It’s there to support their judgment, reduce friction, and close the gap between signal and action.
Every AI decision is surfaced with context, evidence, and clarity, and every outcome is reviewed by a human analyst before it impacts your business. That’s not a limitation. That’s how you get speed and trust at the same time.
eSentire’s Atlas Expert AI capabilities aren’t just powering experiments or future roadmaps. They’re delivering results in production, at global scale. Across thousands of signals and daily investigations, we’re seeing measurable gains:
-
95% alignment between AI investigations and Tier 3 analyst outcomes
-
15-minute MTTC (Mean Time to Contain), representing a 33% improvement
-
99.3% of threats isolated at the first host
-
35% faster threat intel response compared to commercial feeds
-
96% SOC analyst retention, enabled by AI-enhanced workflows that reduce repetitive effort and increase decision impact
Our metrics represent real improvements to both security outcomes and SOC sustainability. This is what it looks like when AI becomes part of your security posture, not just your tech stack.
The result is AI capabilities being integrated into every layer of our threat detection and response infrastructure, guided by 25 years of SecOps expertise and refined through real-world investigations.
To learn more about how eSentire’s Atlas Expert AI can help your organization scale your security operations and get strong security outcomes, contact an eSentire Security Specialist now.
