"AI as Enabler, Not Replacer" Is True. It Is Also Half the Story.
Zoom's CISO, Sandra McLeod, gave the reassuring version of the AI question in a recent Dark Reading interview, and I want to be clear up front: she is right. Her view is that AI is an enabler for human security teams, not a replacement. It automates the repetitive grind inside the SOC and it helps build systems that can stand up to AI-powered attacks. As someone who has watched good analysts burn out on tier-one triage, I am not going to argue with any of that. The framing is correct, it is humane, and it should be the default posture for any team standing up agentic tooling.
My problem is not with what she said. My problem is with where most people stop listening.
The enabler half is real, so use it
Point the agents at the toil. Alert triage, enrichment, correlation, the soul-destroying tier-one queue that exists mostly to be cleared rather than understood. That is exactly the work that should be automated, and automating it buys back the one thing your senior people never have enough of, which is attention for the hard problems. A SOC that runs agents on the boring path so humans can think about the interesting path is a stronger SOC. No notes.
AI serves as an enabler, not a replacement, for human security professionals.
The half that never makes the keynote
Here is the part that gets quietly dropped. The exact capability that lifts your defenders is the capability that arms the other side and grows your own attack surface. Every agent you deploy is a new thing with credentials, with access, with the ability to be talked into doing something it should not. The same reasoning engine that triages your alerts can be prompt-injected through a poisoned ticket, jailbroken through a crafted input, or hijacked as a propagation host by the next generation of adaptive malware.
This is not hypothetical hand-waving. There were 2,130 AI-related CVEs disclosed in 2025, up around 35% year on year. Every agent you wire into production with standing credentials and broad scope is another entry on a list that is already growing faster than the staff meant to watch it. The enabler and the liability are the same object. You do not get one without the other.
Holding two true things at once
Maturity in this space is the ability to hold both statements in your head simultaneously. AI is an enabler for security. AI is a fresh attack surface for security. Junior thinking picks one and builds a slide deck around it. The optimists ship agents everywhere and budget nothing for the blast radius. The cynics refuse to touch any of it and quietly fall behind. Both are wrong in the same way, which is that they only looked at one half of the object.
The practical version looks boring, because the practical version always looks boring:
- Deploy agents on toil, but scope their credentials like you would scope a contractor you do not fully trust
- Treat every agent as an identity with least privilege, not a magic helper with god mode
- Red-team your own AI deployments before you celebrate them
- Instrument the agent's actions with the same telemetry you would demand of any other privileged account
The leadership read
McLeod also described her own arc from technical firefighter to business strategist, from stabilising the posture to anticipating and enabling. That is the right journey, and it maps onto this exact tension. The strategist's job is not to pick the comforting half of the AI story for the board. It is to fund the uncomfortable half. Anyone can sell "AI makes us faster." The actual work is making sure the thing that made you faster did not also hand an adversary a faster way in. Enabler and attack surface. Same object. Budget for both, or you only secured the half that was easy to talk about.
