Will AI Start Replacing Cybersecurity Jobs In 2025 ?
Do cybersecurity jobs have a limited lifespan as AI becomes better and better at securing stuff?
Mark Zuckerberg ruffled a lot of feathers recently with his statements that most code will be written by AI in the future
This carries extra weight given that Meta is one of the biggest employers of developers across the globe.
But Zuckerberg’s statement just indicates a trend that will continue going forward
Once ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in 2022 and GenAI became mainstream .. the world seems to have undergone a massive shift
The question is no longer IF AI will cause disruption but HOW MUCH disruption it will cause ?
Gartner already sees more than 80% of companies using GenAI or GenAI APIs in one form or another by 2026
This leads to the question I get asked regularly .. What about Cybersecurity ?
To be honest .. AI-powered cybersecurity products have been around for years, and I have been skeptical of quite a few of them.
The reason being they were nothing but your standard security product with a few new bells and whistles added.
Nothing special honestly
AI seemed like the latest buzzword which vendors were adding into slide decks to get more money from CISOs and not really a game changer.
However, the massive rise of GenAI has changed that with job disruption a reality for many job industries going forward
Is AI coming for your cybersecurity job?
I honestly believe this question is phrased wrongly
AI is not yet at the level where it can wholly replace Cybersecurity professionals
BUT instead of roles .. think of tasks
Can AI replace tasks and in some cases do it better ? YES
If your job description seems to be
responding to alerts with the same generic copy-pasted emails
Opening and closing tickets for alerts
Downloading/emailing reports to IT
Then bad news .. there is nothing in this job that cannot easily be automated/cut down.
Here are a few cybersecurity tasks most vulnerable to AI automation:
1 - L1 Incident Response
Just to be clear .. I am not talking about those SOC analysts who do deep-level analysis or forensics for which you definitely need human involvement.
However if your job simply involves responding to alerts or updating blacklists in a product, expect this job to become obsolete as more and more automation and orchestration become common
2 - Vulnerability Scanning:
Note I said scanning not analysis or management of vulnerabilities
Running a scan against a server and downloading a PDF to make the IT team install some patches is no one’s idea of an exciting cybersecurity career.
As more and more workflows get automated, this is another job ripe for being moved toward AI
3- Writing SIEM alerts
Does your job involve writing basic alert logic for SIEM products?
GenAI might make your job easier or even redundant in the future as it becomes more and more trained on security data and integrated with security solutions
Splunk
Sumo Logic
Simple YARA rule
4- Cybersecurity documentation
Do you tasks involve creating management reports or updating ISO 27001 policy documents ??
Then this job has a limited life span.
As more and more services move to a managed cloud model, boring documentation will increasingly move to the provider OR get offloaded to an GenAI foundation model trained on your company’s data
The good news
The good news is that while AI might replace cybersecurity jobs.. the demand for cybersecurity professionals will not go away .. current skillsets will simply get replaced with a new set of cybersecurity skills.
AI is far from perfect and still needs humans to refine and oversee it
AI will never replace purely human skills such as strategic thinking, leadership, and empathy.
AI is not going to motivate your cybersecurity team to give it their 100% during an incident.
AI is not going to take your team out to lunches when morale is low
On the flip side, AI is definitely going to be used as a weapon by cyber criminals going forward
AI-based applications also will introduce new types of vulnerabilities, which will require new types of cybersecurity controls
Expect inference attacks and model evasion to become as common as SQL injection and XSS attacks are today
Expect penetration testers and Red Teamers to leverage GenAI for some cool security tests and social engineering assessments.
I expect GenAI to fully become a tool in the cybersecurity team’s portfolio going forward.
The future is bright for AI-based cybersecurity
AI is not a magical silver bullet that will replace humans anytime soon
It still needs humans to run it and improve upon it ( and secure it ! )
Our current cybersecurity skills might get replaced, but it will only get replaced with a completely new one, so the future is bright for this profession!
AI Security is going to be massive field going forward that will create a huge amount of job openings
Good luck on your career and check out my video on this below !