How One AI SOC Crushed 1,200 Alerts in Under 3 Minutes — and Why That Matters for Your Security Team
By Kumar Saurabh, Co-Founder & CEO, AirMDR
Let’s get something straight: nobody’s shopping for an “AI SOC.” That’s not how real security teams think. CISOs aren’t wandering around trade shows hoping to buy the latest acronym. What they’re trying to do is solve a real, operationally painful problem: how to triage, investigate, and respond to a never-ending stream of alerts without burning out their teams or blowing their budgets.
The Problem SMBs Know Too Well
Most mid-sized companies don’t have a fully staffed, round-the-clock SOC. They’re running lean — maybe one or two folks covering security part-time, maybe outsourcing bits and pieces to an MDR or MSSP. And the alert volume? Brutal. False positives, redundant noise, and “investigative rabbit holes” everywhere. You already know the drill.
And here’s the kicker: traditional MDRs aren’t helping. Too many operate like a black box — limited visibility, questionable responsiveness, and a talent for simply forwarding alerts back to the already overwhelmed internal team.
Here’s What Actually Works
We onboarded a customer and — within two weeks — the data looked like this:
- 1,281 alerts ingested
- 84% automatically investigated and closed by our AI analyst ("Darryl")
- <1% required escalation
- 95% of cases triaged in under 3 minutes
Let me repeat: this wasn’t a lab demo. This was real production data, in a live environment, with real threats and noise. No cherry-picking.
The Business Case That Writes Itself
Take a thousand alerts a week. A human analyst doing proper triage and documentation might spend 20+ minutes per alert. That’s 333 hours of work per week — or 8 full-time analysts.
At ~$90K per analyst, that’s a $720K/year operation just for alert triage. And that’s assuming high-quality, consistent investigations (which, let’s be honest, isn’t always the case under time pressure).
Now let’s compare that to AirMDR:
- $72K/year flat rate for a 1,000-user org
- Includes AI-powered triage + human analyst review
- Delivers faster, more consistent results — with full transparency
Why Tools Alone Don’t Cut It
Sure, you could try to build it yourself. Buy a SOAR platform for $45K, hire an automation engineer for $150-200K, and then spend weeks (or months) scripting playbooks. Good luck keeping that updated when your team is already stretched thin.
Here’s what we’ve learned: most SMBs don’t need more tools. They need outcomes. They need triaged, prioritized, and explained alerts. They need peace of mind at 3 AM without racking up headcount or trying to train a SIEM to write love letters.
How the AI Analyst Works (Without the Hand-Waving)
We built our AI analyst, Darryl, to do real investigative work: threat intel lookups, enrichment, correlation, and scoring. When Darryl sees something sketchy — like a U.S.-based user logging in from Morocco — it doesn’t just flag it. It builds a case: highlights the anomaly, checks the IP against threat feeds, analyzes behavior patterns, and explains why it matters.
That case goes into the queue. If it’s strong enough, it escalates. If not, it’s auto-closed. And everything is audit-trailed, reviewable, and can be tuned with custom playbooks — which our system can generate and automate in 15–30 minutes.
No need to hire an automation engineer. Or, spend hours and days automating investigation playbooks. Just results.
Why We Deliver This As a Service (Not Just a Product)
We don’t just give you tools. We give you a working AI SOC that’s tuned, maintained, and accountable. Because we’ve seen what happens when teams try to run this themselves. Even if you had the tech, you’d still need operational muscle to maintain it. That’s why we deliver the outcome — and show you the receipts.
Bottom Line: This Isn’t Magic. It’s Putting AI to Work.
AI isn't a silver bullet, but when it's trained right, paired with human oversight, and measured against real-world KPIs — it can be a force multiplier.
At AirMDR, we’ve cut alert volume by 90%, delivered triage in under 3 minutes, and helped customers avoid spending hundreds of thousands in analyst time.
You want SOC-level outcomes without SOC-level overhead? This is how you do it.
Want to see the real dashboard behind the story?
Let’s show you how we’re delivering results that legacy MDRs can’t.
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