Can AI Help Businesses Beat Cyber Threats?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

It's the Morning Drive securing digital assets. Next, as cyber threats become more sophisticated, security teams are facing a growing flood of alerts that human analysts just can't scale to handle. Now today, as we, I guess, narrowcast this and record this, Friday, September the 18th, it's the final day of GISEC Global 2026 here in Dubai at the Dubai Exhibition Center at Expo.

And UAE-based cyber security company, Paramount, has launched SoCMate, which is an AI-powered assistant. And it's designed to help security teams investigate threats and hopefully respond faster. Pradeep Menon is the chief AI and security officer at Paramount, joining me to discuss, among other things, how AI is changing cyber security and why speed makes a difference when an attack hits as well, among other things. Pradeep, welcome.

Pradeep Menon (0:57)

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_1 (0:59)

It's good to have you here. So, walking the floor at GISEC, the volume of data, the speed of modern attacks, essentially staggering, really. I know that much. What's the core pain point that you hear from chief information security officers about the noise in their operation centers?

What's the gossip around the water cooler kind of thing?

Pradeep Menon (1:24)

Yeah. So, it's kind of alert fatigue is the major word, because you have so many alarms, consider that you have thousands plus alarms going on the same time, and you need a human judgment, investigation, analysis at the same time. So, let's say you are in a huge estate with various CCTVs and entry controls, and multiple set of things, imagine that as an analogy. And then suddenly in your command center, there are thousands of alarms going on at the same time, and you're trying to see where exactly the breach has happened, has it been a real one, a benign one, etc.

So, this is a challenge which cyber security, CISOs have a major headache on. That's a pain point.

SPEAKER_1 (2:08)

I mean, that's in my head. It would be like being in a building where every, I mean, literally every second, there's a fire alarm going off or some form of alarm.

It would be pretty wearing in that profession.

Pradeep Menon (2:23)

So, that's what the CISOs are currently facing in terms of, and cyber security space is also notoriously known for so many products, you know, in terms of you have a firewall, you have a data leakage prevention system, you have a malware detection system, like thousands of system if you see the entire parcels of products, and everyone throwing in alerts, and CISO and the team trying to find a judgment in terms of which one is the correct one, which one could be a positive, is a huge challenge facing cyber security.

SPEAKER_1 (2:57)

I want to come back and talk to you a little bit more about alert fatigue, actually. I think it's a really interesting phenomenon.

GISEC 2026, first of all, though, is putting AI, cybersecurity, that's firmly in the spotlight. That's the reason it lives, if you like. But what's changing most quickly in the way businesses are defending themselves against cyber threats right now?

Pradeep Menon (3:22)

Yeah. So multiple situation which AI has brought cybersecurity professionals at the industry as such. One is at an individual level, there is a very large QCAD option of AI. So it's very rare that one, any employees would not have some AI solutions with them in the organization. And the organizations have not been able to detect it or understand it. So there is a huge challenge of IP exodus within the organization. So their intellectual property, whether there is designs, whether there is information, all is being fed into the models and it's called shadow AI, so which the organizations and the security teams are quite trying to grapple with. So that's one of the threats, major threats which AI landscape has brought in.

And apart from them is also that the accountability of AI rests in multiple departments within the organizations. To have a proper governance structure, how to unlock the productivity that AI provides without hampering on too many controls, is a challenge what organizations largely faces in the AI landscape.

SPEAKER_1 (4:31)

Okay. So you kind of pointed that, look, security teams are buried under thousands of positives, right? Fragmented single signals every day.

How critical has the burnout and the alert fatigue problem become? And how difficult is it to separate a genuine threat from just that noise of all the alarms going, as it were?

Pradeep Menon (4:57)

Yeah. So that's something which, you know, what we say in our security parlance, it's the threat gets detecting and analyzed is as good as the analyst, human analyst who is sitting on the table.