Can a $20 AI Hacker Outspeed Your Security Team? | Neal Iyer | Splunk AI | EP 65

AI attackers can now move at a speed and scale that traditional security operations were never designed to handle.In this episode of **So What About AI Agents**, Philippe Trounev sits down with **Neal Iyer, Director of Product Management for AI at Splunk Security**, to talk about what happens when autonomous AI agents become part of both the attack and defense side of cybersecurity.Neal breaks the new threat landscape into three forces: **scale, speed, and sophistication**. AI can give relatively unsophisticated attackers capabilities that previously required much more expertise, while autonomous attacks can move so quickly that a security team celebrating a five-minute detection time may already be too late.We get into:• How AI changes the economics of cyber attacks• Why cheap AI agents can dramatically increase the number and sophistication of attacks• Why traditional SOC response times may no longer be fast enough• How prompt injection creates a new attack surface for defensive AI agents• Why simply deploying more security agents isn't enough• Building a security “harness” around autonomous agents• Runtime monitoring, guardrails, observability, and human escalation• When security agents should act autonomously — and when a human needs to stay in the loop• Using business context to distinguish between compromising an intern's laptop and locking out a CEO• Why security tools need better integration for agentic operations• How organizations can start testing their agents against prompt injection and other attacks today• Why Splunk and Cisco are exploring purpose-built small language models for cybersecurity• The role of open-source, self-hosted, and multi-model AI strategies• Why AI security economics may force companies to rethink how they store and process security dataWe also get into the broader question of whether frontier AI companies can really replace specialized enterprise software — or whether impressive demos fall apart when customers need reliability, support, governance, and measurable outcomes.The bigger takeaway is that the future SOC probably isn't humans versus AI attackers.It's **agents fighting agents — with humans designing the systems, permissions, guardrails, and escalation paths that keep those agents under control.**Subscribe to **So What About AI Agents** for conversations with the people actually building and deploying AI agents in production.https://www.docsie.io