AI WORLD HQ
When a hacker tries to break into a company's network, the clock starts ticking. Somewhere, a human analyst has to notice the attack, dig into what happened, and decide how to stop it. That whole process used to take hours.
What Sophos built
According to the cybersecurity firm Sophos, integrating OpenAI's Daybreak into its security operations cut threat-investigation time by 96%. An investigation that once ate most of a workday might now wrap up in minutes.
Sophos also says 52% of its MDR cases are now automated. MDR stands for Managed Detection and Response — a 24/7 service where a security team watches over a company's systems and steps in when something looks wrong. If the AI can handle roughly half of those cases on its own, analysts can spend their time on the more complex attacks that genuinely need human judgment.
Why humans still matter
"Automated" does not mean "unattended." Sophos emphasizes that a human analyst still reviews the AI's conclusions before any action is taken on a customer's system. The AI triages — it sorts, summarizes, and points to the suspicious bits — but a person makes the final call. That detail matters, because a wrong call in cybersecurity can block real users from their own accounts, or worse.
Wrap-up
Faster isn't always better — but in cybersecurity, time is what attackers need most. If AI can shrink the gap between "we noticed" and "we stopped it," and humans still check the work, that's a meaningful shift. The next time you read about a major breach, the speed of the response is often what decided how bad it got.