Help Net Security reports on a Swimlane survey of 500 security operations staff at organizations that already use AI. Most respondents are happy with the change: nearly nine in ten say AI has made their work more satisfying. Yet a quarter say AI slowed their skill development, and those analysts are about as satisfied as colleagues who say AI helped them learn (91% versus 92%). The survey cannot tell whether a satisfied analyst is growing into a senior investigator or simply enjoying a lighter workload while promotion-relevant skills never develop.
Only 1% of respondents expect the analyst career path to remain unchanged. The most common expectation is new roles built around overseeing, checking and coordinating AI systems, and nearly half expect entry-level jobs to become harder to get, either because employers will demand more experience or because fewer openings will offer a way to gain it. The repetitive casework AI absorbs is the same work that used to teach new hires the basics, so the source suggests training will have to be built deliberately.
Analysts say they now spend more time reviewing AI output, and more than nine in ten are confident they could catch an incorrect or incomplete recommendation. Their biggest worry is themselves: over-reliance on AI recommendations was the most-cited concern about expanding AI use, ahead of exposing sensitive data. The survey also finds a leadership gap. Three-quarters of leaders describe AI as extensively deployed across multiple security functions, while about half of practitioners say the same. Formal role redesign is associated with bigger gains: 71% of those whose organizations rewrote analyst roles around higher-value work say AI significantly raised satisfaction, versus 29% without such a change. Because leaders and practitioners came from different organizations, the gap cannot prove bosses misread their teams, but it suggests managers should track skill development separately from job satisfaction.