Imagine opening your laptop each morning to find four thousand new emails—some urgent, some irrelevant, some obviously spam—but all demanding your time and attention. You sift, filter and prioritise, but delayed responses pile up and you still miss something critical.

This is everyday life for today’s enterprise SOC teams. Analysts are under pressure like never before, and they’re running out of capacity to keep up.

Today’s enterprises juggle an average of 83 security tools, covering everything from SIEM and endpoint detection to network monitoring, email gateways, cloud defence, and vulnerability scanning. Each system produces its own stream of alerts, many of which overlap or repeat the same warnings. The result is a barrage of notifications that security teams must investigate daily.

Most alerts lack context and risk-prioritisation so every ping looks equally urgent. Per a global IBM study, nearly two-thirds of alerts are now false positives. When a system cries wolf this often, engineers become desensitised and pay less attention to alerts that matter. The fallout is extensive:

• Crushing SOC workloads (averaging 4,500 alerts a day)

• Persistent backlogs

• Critical alerts buried under low-priority notifications

• Longer investigation time

• Increased risk of successful attacks

The consequences of alert fatigue reach deep into risk, resources and retention.:

Higher Risk Exposure

An analyst making a judgement call on whether an email is malicious after reviewing 300 similar alerts is operating at a cognitive disadvantage. In one case, a SOC team we worked with re-checked 7 (out of 97) emails we flagged as suspicious, and realised they’d misclassified all seven. Fatigue had degraded their judgement.

Seven errors out of 97 may not sound a lot but it only takes one missed phishing email to provide a means of entry into your network. The longer a breach goes unnoticed, the more time an attacker has to exfiltrate data. A good example is the MGM Grand Casino. In 2023, this legendary venue suffered a US$100m loss when Scattered Spider members impersonated key MGM employees to gain login credentials to the casino’s AWS infrastructure. They used that access to move laterally within MGM’s systems, shutting down thousands of square feet of gaming systems and costing the casino over US$8 million per day for 10 days.

Burnout and Turnover

Unsurprisingly, 71% of SOC analysts report burnout symptoms, and average tenure in the role hovers around two years. These professionals entered the field to protect organisations against sophisticated threats, not to spend eight hours deciding what alert needs a “drop everything” response and what can wait.

Knowledge disappears when good people leave. The constant need to recruit new analysts further squeezes budgets, and a shortage of skilled cybersecurity talent intensifies the strain.

Wasted Investment

Security platforms cost money upfront, but the real cost lives in the strategic opportunities you miss when your best analysts are tied up in low-value investigations, and the attrition costs you suffer when burned-out analysts leave for better opportunities elsewhere. When you add up these hidden costs, at what point does the tool stop being an investment and start being a liability?

Falling Behind

Phishing remains the top cyber threat and alert volumes have soared by 200% in just two quarters. Hundreds of manual reports add to the pile. Those numbers will only increase as criminals adapt their tactics and further industrialise AI to research key targets and craft highly convincing, targeted scams.

Even low-skilled attackers are running “Phishing-as-a-Service” kits bought cheaply on the dark web. Human SOC teams can’t fight machine-speed behavioural manipulation while constrained by human limits—that asymmetry is unsustainable.

As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated and security tools spew out endless alerts, burnout is only going to get worse. How should CISOs respond? The solution is AI-powered behavioural analysis—not just to detect threats, but to help teams act on the right events, faster.

Abnormal AI’s Behavior Platform redefines incident response. Instead of flooding dashboards with low-fidelity alerts, it intelligently triages and categorises threats, eliminating false positives. Suspicious emails are quarantined automatically without human intervention. This happens in real time, before emails reach users and damage can be done.

Advanced pattern recognition provides a high level of confidence. Abnormal uses 40,000+ behavioural signals and machine learning to build a baseline of normal communication patterns for your organisation (the “known good”). Subtle deviations are instantly flagged and remediated, even if the attack doesn’t match known signatures.

When the tool serves as an immediate firebreak against alert overload, you should see immediate results. Abnormal’s customers report:

• 90% reduction in phishing attacks reaching users.

• 91% less time spent on user-reported suspicious emails, saving SOC teams more than five hours a week per 1,000 mailboxes.

• 50%+ reduction in SOC headcount dedicated to email security.

• Rather than waiting months to tune rules and train models, behavioural AI can baseline normal communication patterns and begin detecting anomalies almost immediately after implementation.​

These efficiency gains lead to the next measure, which is resource reallocation. Switching to Abnormal doesn’t mean jobs are lost, it means valuable security talent can finally be put to better use. One customer went from needing 12 full-time employees for triage and administration down to just 0.75 FTE, freeing up 11 specialists for more meaningful security work across the organisation. When used well, AI strengthens security operations and the people behind the console.

Introducing AI to your SOC works best when it’s done one step at a time to reduce disruption and give analysts time to get comfortable.

1. To get started, pinpoint the biggest time drains for your analysts.

Which alerts swallow their day? Which investigations are low-fidelity busywork? Get specific about your five worst offenders. The noisy cases that show quick wins are where you focus.

2. Choose specialist over generalist tools.

Be cautious of “Swiss army knife” platforms that claim to solve every security problem. While comprehensive platforms have their place, best-in-class tools for email security will generally beat generalist suites with bolt-on features. In the same vein, commercial products can be more cost-effective than a custom build with its maintenance burdens and key-person dependencies. Commercial solutions bring support, updates and long-term continuity that in-house projects rarely match.

3. Loop in your privacy and compliance teams.

Your privacy team will want to know what data gets processed and how long it’s kept. These are valid questions. A GDPR-compliant vendor will only retain emails flagged as malicious, leaving everything else in your environment. Demand clarity from vendors about things like SOC II Type 2 and ISO 42001 certifications, where data is hosted, and who the sub-processors are. Vendors worth your time will answer straight and show their work.

In Europe, workers councils may need to sign off on technology that analyses employee communications. Emphasise that AI is protective, not invasive—it’s analysing behaviour patterns solely to catch threats, not to monitor people’s productivity. Approach these talks openly and approvals come faster.

4. Look for quick wins with minimal setup.

Solutions that require months of configuration and integration before they demonstrate value are problematic for a SOC team that’s stretched thin. Select API-first platforms that connect to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and SIEM systems within minutes, with no major mail flow changes or rules tuning.

Instead of an overwhelmed security team drowning in a sea of alerts, unable to tell a false alarm from a real emergency, AI can shift the balance. Threat detection and response times improve when AI takes over the sorting and sifting. Fewer hours are wasted, SOC environments are healthier, and skilled people win back the time to work on strategic security improvements. If the choice is between running teams into the ground with manual firefighting or empowering them with tools that keep up with the scale of modern threats, your analysts deserve the latter.

Learn more about how Abnormal can improve your SOC efficiency by scheduling a demo today!