As global leaders gathered in Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF), under the theme “The Spirit of Dialogue,” the focus was on collaboration, connection, and shared responsibility as engines of growth. Yet beneath those conversations sits an increasingly hard-to-ignore reality. Economic growth is inseparable from digital interconnectedness, while the infrastructure sustaining that interconnected world was designed for a far more trusting era than the one we operate, writes Dan Bridges, Technical Director – International, at Dropzone AI.
The WEF’s latest cybersecurity outlook makes this tension unmistakable. Fragmenting geopolitical cooperation is increasing systemic risk, while AI is accelerating both cyber offence and cyber defence. What once lived comfortably inside IT security teams has now become a leadership issue. Boards face a paradox where digital innovation drives growth, but the systems enabling that growth introduce new and compounding forms of risk at unprecedented speed and scale.
This is the cybersecurity paradox. Digitalisation has delivered enormous value by tightly linking supply chains, platforms, cloud services, identities, and data flows. But that same interdependence also amplifies failure. A misconfigured SaaS application, a compromised supplier, or a manipulated AI workflow no longer creates a localised incident, it creates vulnerabilities that can spread across organisations in minutes.
The WEF Global Risks Report 2026 describes a world “on a precipice,” where trust is eroding and the velocity of disruption continues to rise. In this environment, cybersecurity is no longer only about defence. It is about maintaining trust in the digital systems that underpin economic activity itself.
A Breaking Point
Nowhere is this paradox more visible than inside the modern Security Operations Centre (SOC). SOCs were not designed for today’s operating conditions. Alert volumes have scaled far beyond human capacity, while threat complexity and velocity has increased at the same time. The result is an operating model under strain, leaving analysts buried in alerts, investigations bottlenecked by manual triage, inconsistent response quality, and escalating burnout across already scarce talent pools.
The core problem isn’t capability or motivation, it’s the basic numbers involved. Human-led triage does not scale to environments generating thousands of alerts every day. While teams work through queues, attackers compress the time between initial access and meaningful impact. In many organisations, it still takes hours to confidently investigate and respond to activity that unfolds in minutes.
This is further compounded by detection strategies that are rooted in a different era. Signature-based logic and static playbooks assume attackers behave in predictable ways. Today’s adversaries do not. They exploit identity, adapt in real time, abuse legitimate tooling, and hide in plain sight. AI-assisted and polymorphic techniques evolve faster than static rules can be maintained, widening the gap between threat behaviour and defensive response.
Risk Hiding in Plain Sight: Business Hours Security
Attackers are also masters of timing. Nights, weekends, and holidays remain prime windows of opportunity, not because organisations lack tooling, but because human-only security operations struggle to sustain consistent vigilance. Alerts accumulate, investigations pause, and attacker dwell time quietly expands.
This creates an “always-on” gap between the continuous nature of digital risk and the limits of traditional operating models. Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) suffers not because the SOC was never designed to function at full effectiveness 24/7. In a digital economy that never pauses, this gap increasingly defines breach impact.
What Cyber Resilience Actually Requires
The WEF’s Digital Trust framework offers a useful lens: security and reliability by design, accountability through oversight, and transparency that keeps humans decisively in control. When applied to security operations, these principles point to a clear recalibration.
Detection must shift from static indicators to behaviour-led analysis that correlates identity, cloud, endpoint, and network activity. Automation must evolve beyond brittle “if-then” logic toward systems that can reason across context while operating within defined guardrails. Success must be measured by outcomes, detection speed, response time, and containment windows, rather than activity volume. And critically, security capability must be consistent at every hour, not only during the working day.
Role of the AI SOC Analyst
This is where the operating model changes and where the AI SOC analyst becomes an important component. They are not intended to replace human analysts, but to be a force multiplier. By autonomously triaging alerts, conducting investigations, enriching context across tools and data sources, and suppressing noise, AI SOC analysts absorb the volume of work that overwhelms traditional SOCs.
Unlike human teams, they operate continuously. Alerts are investigated the moment they appear, regardless of whether it’s midday or the middle of the night. False positives are filtered out early. Real threats are escalated with context already assembled. The backlog never piles up overnight.
The impact is practical and immediate. When machines handle the repetitive, time-critical investigation work, human analysts can focus where they add the most value: threat hunting, analysing adversary tactics, and long-term risk reduction. More importantly, response times collapse from hours to minutes, precisely where attackers previously held the advantage.
In effect, AI SOC analysts close the always-on gap that attackers have learned to exploit, delivering continuous security outcomes without forcing organisations into unsustainable staffing models.
A Leadership Imperative
The WEF reinforces a simple truth that cybersecurity is now a leadership responsibility. Solving the cybersecurity paradox doesn’t require dozens of new initiatives, but a few deliberate commitments. Leaders must assume AI will shape both attack and defence. They should design operations for failure rather than perfection and turn digital trust principles into measurable SOC outcomes while closing the after-hours response gap. Automation must elevate, not replace, human expertise.
Economic growth in 2026 will depend on digital trust. Earning that trust means retiring assumptions from a more forgiving era and rebuilding security operations for a world defined by speed, scale, and uncertainty. Behaviour-led detection, governed autonomy, and continuous response are now structural requirements for resilience.
By adopting practical AI, implementing strong governance, and rethinking operations, organisations can turn digital trust into a long-term competitive advantage.
