“We're measuring technology against being perfect, but we don't measure humans against being perfect. … If an error rate in a process is 7% and AI is 7%, okay, you're at parity. If AI gets to 5%, that's a two-point increase. That's good. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect.”
Cybersecurity Today · October 2026
Context
The host said security staff buried in alerts object that AI isn't perfect. Ely argues AI should be compared with the current error rate of human processes, not with perfection.
Transcript
…to vulner management and attack surface management to every other part of security. And just like us, everyone is saying, Where's AI the unfair advantage for the defenders and not just the attacker? So it's an amazing time of that intersection between AI and cybersecurity. Again, I believe anyway.
…in the next month in the future? We live in dog years now and probably faster than that. But as you're seeing over the next several months, what do you see coming up? What do you see that is going to be important as we embrace? And I think we will embrace AI in both security and our enterprises.
Yeah. I think there's one thing there was a nuance to something you said that's really important. Some people say AI is not perfect. And I think the interesting thing is we're measuring technology against being perfect, but we don't measure humans against being perfect. And in these processes, we really have to measure AI's effectiveness against our current state of reality. If an error rate in a process is 7% and AI is 7%, okay, you're at parity. If AI gets to 5%, that's a two-point increase. That's good. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect. And I think we're starting to slowly see that shift that people are embracing that idea, but it's hard because we think of technology as having to be perfect because it was created. So it has to be bug free. And it's just not the reality. So I think, one, we're seeing that shift. We're seeing people be more open to the realities of the world and the benefits. The next thing that I think is a…
Yeah, I think that's a perception people may be missing, though. I sometimes feel like when people talk about AI, they talk about it like a steamroller. It's just coming over us and there's nobody. And there are a lot of creative people out there who are looking at and doing fundamental research…
The research community in the AI Speed: is probably one of the most collaborative I've ever seen in my career of like tech communities collaborating with each other. We have an AI research team based in Zurich and Zurich is this central AI research hub of the world and all of the Top teams are…
One of the things that excites me in terms of what's happening in security, it's a challenge, but I think it's exciting, is you have a whole totally new explosion of identities with agents. Is that something people are talking about with you?
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