Why the autonomous SOC is the wrong goal

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Mike Nichols, General Manager of Security at Elastic, fresh off the Gartner Security and Risk Summit in the D.C. area, where AI dominated every conversation on the conference floor. Mike walks us through what CISOs are actually asking about, what a real agentic SOC looks like in practice, and why keeping humans on the loop is the key philosophical distinction that separates a thoughtful AI implementation from a reckless one. The conversation covers “tribal knowledge,” shadow AI, prompt injection, model sovereignty, and the exploding attack surface that AI agents themselves create, with Mike making the case that AI adoption is a dial and not a switch, and that transparency, explainability, and a healthy dose of skepticism are the foundation of building trust that actually sticks.