As AI Disrupts Tech Hiring, IT Companies Must ‘Batten Down The Hatches’ For The Agentic Adversary

Instead of using AI to slash workforces, vendors and solution providers must harness the technology to defend against the agentic adversary ‘that’s going to make you look foolish in security,’ says one cybersecurity leader.

Artificial Intelligence is altering the IT workforce as AI tools are beginning to fill in the talent blanks for companies, said top security executives in a recent CRN Security Roundtable discussion.

The technology is creating a complex landscape that’s leading to reduced junior, or entry-level, hiring alongside increased demand for specialists and AI-focused roles, according to research firm Forrester.

Still, the technology isn’t ready to replace humans for more complex or sophisticated tasks, the tech leaders said.

There’s little debate that AI is changing tech hiring through automation and shifting focus away from entry-level roles to specialized AI talent. For some vendors, AI is becoming table stakes from a competitive standpoint, but rather than turning the technology toward workforce reductions, tech companies right now should be using AI to battle their cybersecurity adversaries, the executives said.

[Related: 7 Top Security Execs On How The AI Revolution Is Impacting MSPs]

Because of AI, the IT workforce is going to be “massively disrupted” in ways that are hard for the industry to envision for the long term, said Dave Baggett, founder and CEO of Inky.

“I happen to use ChatGPT, but there [are] others that are similar, like Claude … for things like coding. I find it to be like a junior developer who knows everything, which is a weird thing. They’re a junior developer in the sense they have no aesthetic taste. If you ask it to do a specific task, it will just tell you how to do that task. It won’t do what a really good human would do and say, ‘You’re doing it the wrong way. That’s the wrong way to think about it. That’s not the right approach.’ And that makes it much, much weaker than a real developer. Now, will that get fixed? Probably really soon, but I don’t think we’re at the point where for anything really highly skilled you can actually replace all the humans,” he said.

While there is hype around the idea of replacing humans with AI, it’s still not possible for more “sophisticated” tasks, such as coding, Baggett said.

"I’m not ready to fire my people. I’m not firing anybody, but I certainly tell everyone, ‘Hey, you should be using AI because it makes you 10 times more productive, potentially,’” he said.

Meanwhile, IT professionals are being tasked with “Level Three,” or more difficult tech issues, and the landscape of how these professionals are entering the networking space as operators is changing as a result of AI, said Xan Stevenson, head of partner sales and distribution for Network-as-a-Service specialist Meter.

“On the people side of this, whether you want to call it the gray tsunami, there aren’t enough network operators that are in the market. A lot of MSPs are just dealing with lack of talent. And the reality is those people aren’t showing up five years from now—they’re going to be doing other things. … What that means … is you’re going to have to be in a situation where you can support Tier 1 and Tier 2 [issues] as table stakes and automate the network as fast as possible and dependably. If you don’t do that, you’re just not a viable option in the market," he said.

Hiring has already become more challenging for those at the entry level as businesses look to AI to help them accomplish more with less, especially at the junior level, said Adam Winston, field CTO for WatchGuard Technologies.

“I think one of the more striking stats here in the U.S. economy is that we’re not hiring new grads. Because basically … you have that junior-level programmer capability. If you graduate that up and say, ‘If the AI can then get to intermediate to professional, and you’re getting to the point where you have 10 people in the company where there used to be 400 and worse, if your competitive pressures are such that you and the people you compete against have a profit margin and a price point where your unit cost is 10 cents at Sophos, but we’re sitting here with a whole bunch of people at Watchguard and we’re 50 cents, that’s the day we have to start cutting or not exist because the market will define that as the day you get cleaved,” he said.

But the answer isn’t for vendors and solution providers to start creating a strategy around building agentic AI replacements for their workforces, Winston said.

“Let the market do that in a few years but start now battening down the hatches for the agentic adversary that’s going to make you look foolish in security when you can get disrupted tomorrow with this problem,” he said.

The potential personnel problem related to the introduction of AI can wait, Winston said. The current problem, he said, is bad actors using agentic AI to impact businesses right now.

“The timeline doesn’t excite us all. We don't think we’re going to be sitting here with gold watches in 25 years doing MSP work. It’s going to completely be transformed," Winston said. “But we have to be conscious of, I think, what the closest problem we’re trying to solve actually is. The agentic adversary is going to make you look bad and you’re still not [addressing] it.”