Intelligent Automation: The Future of Business Efficiency

The business world is increasingly focused on the rapidly-evolving benefits and offerings of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Nowadays, you can more effectively protect your organization and strengthen your security practices by leveraging AI. As such, CSOs and CIOs should be at the forefront of the automation conversation. That means innovating new ways to use intelligent automation to protect employees, data, and customers.

AI-powered intelligent automation will allow your security workflows to learn and adapt independently to changing threat landscapes and evolving bad actors while freeing up your human resources for deeper analysis. Specifically, when it comes to your internal abuse mailbox, AI can automatically learn and improve upon its own email threat case processing. In turn, it can reduce the amount of human review while improving remediation speed and accuracy.

Six benefits of intelligent automation for security operations

Intelligent automation can transform any organization’s ability to remain responsive to evolving security threats. It pays to innovate your security operations with this type of AI.

Consider these key advantages of intelligent automation for security operations:

1. Faster response times

Let automated workflows triage and remediate suspicious emails in the abuse mailbox when possible. That way, known threats get automatically addressed immediately upon receipt — even after hours — without waiting for your security team to come online.

2. Reduced workload on security teams

Let your specialized human resources focus on deeper dives into newer threats or bigger campaigns. Intelligent automation can clear the abuse mailbox queue of known threat types. Automated triage can provide initial findings and context. In turn, this results in better data for automated intelligent models to train on, saving additional review time in the future.

3. Automated investigation of unknown threat types

Intelligent automation can investigate and automatically respond to known threats. In addition, it can also proactively investigate unknown or new threat types and present suggestions and research of potential responses for your security team, allowing your team to respond more quickly to evolving threats.

4. Improved accuracy of reviews

Humans make mistakes, and it often happens in the workplace. Automating review wherever possible will reduce the opportunity for human error while increasing the efficiency of the overall workflow.

5. Scaled remediation deployment

Intelligent automation enables your security team to quickly deploy remediation across your entire organization’s end-user email inboxes.

6. Quicker and easier reporting and improvements

Intelligent automation effortlessly delivers data for reporting and auditing. It can quickly highlight patterns in abuse to inform future model and machine learning improvements.

The risks and challenges of intelligent automation

In order to adopt intelligent automation, it's necessary to embrace new and rapidly changing technologies, which inherently entail risks and challenges. You can avoid many risks and overcome challenges with proper oversight.

CIOs and CSOs should keep an eye out for the following:

False negatives and false positives

Intelligent automation isn't perfect. Automated abuse mailbox remediation may occasionally produce false positives or false negatives. As the model trains on its data, those issues become self-perpetuating. This can be avoided with continuous monitoring, spot checks, and quality control human review.

Privacy and transparency concerns

When a computer is making decisions, users may lack sufficient insight into why a particular email was remediated in a certain way or be wary of a computer reading and processing their emails. These concerns can be mitigated with proper training and change management. Also, your security team can instill confidence and trust throughout the organization by communicating and being transparent about how an automated abuse mailbox works.

These risks and concerns shouldn't stop you from using intelligent automation in your organization; they can be mitigated with proper oversight. Establishing continuous monitoring, A/B testing of models, and auditing decisions and patterns detected by intelligent automation is essential. This oversight, although time-consuming for your security analysts, ensures your automated efforts have high-quality choices at scale.

Additionally, to further trust in the implementation of intelligent automation, CSOs and CIOs can enhance their security workflows with custom role-based access controls, which will ensure that members of the security team are restricted in their access to just the information and workflows necessary for their job - whether their role be investigation or oversight of automated processes.

Advancements in intelligent automation

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing, offering more to security professionals and business owners daily. In response, CSOs and CIOs should take measures to stay up to date.

Consider the following intelligent automation advancements:

• Natural language processing (NLP) and Generative AI advancements are revolutionizing business processes to save time, money, and human effort, notably in customer support and text-based data analysis.
• Predictive analytics capabilities are improving foresight on changes in revenue or impact on operations, which can help security teams better anticipate future threats.
• Process assessment intelligent automation models can help businesses identify and improve bottlenecks and issues in their workflows.
• Automated coding tools, such as Google’s PaLM and DeepMind’s AlphaCode, can fix errors in code and even turn written business requirements into working code.

Advances in AI-driven automation strategically empower business leaders to boost the value of their organizations. The ability to handle large amounts of data on the fly to intelligently automate tasks makes it possible to significantly increase operational efficiency.

How CSOs and CIOs can best take advantage of intelligent automation

CSOs and CIOs have an incredible opportunity to implement intelligent automation tools within their security workflows to reduce time spent on automatable tasks. It also helps to improve output, reserving time for security analysts to spend on more meaningful work, like deep dive analysis, broader campaign research, or machine learning quality control measures.

Investing early in these tools and technology, as well as in training your security teams on how to use them, will save your business time and money with little ramp-up. Also, employing strong quality control measures (e.g., oversight of the models and comparing automated output with human review) and effectively training your entire organization on how to spot potential areas for improvement, will maximize the benefits of intelligent automation.

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