Why Cybersecurity Jobs Are Likely To Resist AI Layoff Pressures: Experts

While AI-driven automation seems poised to disrupt nearly all parts of the workforce, security analysts are poised to be a rare exception, cybersecurity experts tell CRN.

Even as AI-driven automation spreads to nearly all parts of the workforce — cybersecurity teams included — the field of cyber defense is one of the few likely to be spared from major layoffs going forward, according to security experts.

This is particularly the case for workers such as Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts, which are poised to remain in-demand even as they are expected to adopt GenAI and agentic technologies in a massive way, experts told CRN.

For modern cybersecurity teams and MSSPs, “there are so many things they have to do,” said Naasief Edross, chief security strategist at St. Louis-based World Wide Technology, No. 9 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025. “Any type of advantage you can give them, by using machines to help them defend [their organizations], is only going to allow them to focus on different sets of problems.”

The bottom line is that there will “always” be a need for a significant number of cybersecurity professionals, Edross said. “I do not believe this technology will ever make the human obsolete.”

The notion that SOC analyst jobs and other roles requiring security expertise might be at risk would have been unthinkable just a few years ago — making the sudden shift to discussions around AI-driven redundancy for humans in the SOC all the more startling.

“If you go back about two years ago, there’s this constant hum in the industry that we have a few million less cybersecurity professionals than we need,” Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said during a briefing with media and analysts in October.

“I’ve always maintained the solution to that problem is not more people in cybersecurity and filling all the [open] jobs. The solution is more automation and more AI,” Arora said in response to a question from CRN. “Now that suddenly we’re in a place where people are going to start deploying AI, we’re wondering, ‘What’s going to happen to people whose jobs are at stake in cybersecurity?’ Guess what — we were underfunded by 3 million people. So hopefully [AI] allows us a fighting chance to compete with the bad guys.”

Ultimately, “I think the SOC analyst’s future is amazing,” he said.

Speaking with CRN, security experts pointed to several additional factors — beyond just the preexisting shortage of security professionals — indicating that SOC roles could be resistant to replacement by AI and agents.

For starters, given the high stakes for getting cybersecurity right, humans will be needed at the very least to provide checks and balances for the AI systems, experts said.

“AI still has a significant propensity to make mistakes, which in the security world is quite problematic,” said Boaz Gelbord, senior vice president and chief security officer of Akamai. “So you’re always going to need a human check on that.”

At the same time, human orchestration of the AI systems will be an ongoing necessity as well, according to experts.

“You need that creativity. You need to understand and piece together and review the LLM’s work,” said Dov Yoran, co-founder and CEO of Command Zero, a startup offering an LLM-powered cyber investigation platform. “I don’t see how the human goes away.”

And while entry-level security analysts may find parts of their roles becoming redundant due to AI, most organizations will want to continue employing them, if only to prepare them to become higher-tier analysts over time, Yoran said.

“You’ll certainly still need those Tier 2 and 3 [analysts] that have the experience,” he said. “Where are those going to come from, if you all of a sudden kill your Tier 1 footprint?”

Improved Retention, Security Outcomes

At present, there is simply no appetite from customers to slash their cybersecurity workforces, according to Gonen Fink, executive vice president of products for Cortex and cloud at Palo Alto Networks, which has focused heavily on providing SOC automation technologies.

“It’s never, ‘We have too many people. Give us a tool to replace 50 percent of them.’ We don’t hear that,” Fink said. “Instead it’s more [like], ‘No matter how many people we have, we need more. So give us a tool so that our people can do more with what we have.’”

The potential is also there for AI and agentic technologies to significantly improve quality of life — and even mental health — for perpetually overwhelmed SOC teams, experts said. And for employers, this increased job satisfaction could make skilled analysts easier to retain, giving another incentive to not prioritize layoffs.

Without a doubt, right now there are “a lot of very talented workers in the world of cybersecurity that, unfortunately, their day-to-day gets reduced to phishing investigations,” said Chris Ebley, CTO at Annapolis, Md.-based Blackwood, No. 93 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500.

Crucially, the productivity and efficiency gains from AI-driven SOC automation could also provide a massive improvement to security outcomes.

“We can now cover more ground with that same team,” said Command Zero’s Yoran. And ironically, because of AI itself, there’s also “a lot more ground to cover” in security right now, he said.

Even with the continual onslaught of alerts from security tools, AI enables security teams to “tackle more of those alerts and handle the triaging, all the way down to case resolution, in a more timely manner,” Yoran said. “That’s magic. That’s where I think the real power is going to be.”

‘So Much To Do’

At most, there might be an initial slowdown in hiring for open SOC positions as organizations recalibrate to the new AI reality, though this is likely to be temporary, experts said.

“Then it’ll pick back up as normal,” Yoran said. “But we’re so far behind the eight-ball anyway — in any normal enterprise, those [analysts] are so overstretched and underwater. They’re doing amazing jobs, but they’re not in an easy position.”

The potential is also there for organizations to gain equivalent capabilities to a security analyst for the first time thanks to AI, according to Blackwood’s Ebley.

“You enable institutions who have no designated security personnel to effectively now have analysts, because the AI gives them access to an analyst — it’s just not a human,” Ebley said. “That’s a huge win.”

All in all, it’s clear that in cybersecurity, “there’s so much to do” that everyone with skills and expertise will be needed for the foreseeable future, he said.

“I don’t think anyone has had the amount of human capital they needed for their SOC to be effective,” Ebley said. So when it comes to AI for security teams, “I’m definitely bullish.”