Cyberattacks are increasingly making use of artificial intelligence, using the technology to target organizations at scale. To fight back, the corporate cybersecurity teams that track, monitor, and respond to these threats may need to start using AI a lot more too. Or at least that’s what Edward Wu argues. He’s the CEO of Dropzone AI, which has developed a large language model-based digital cyberthreat investigator.
Dropzone AI calls its tech an “agentic security operations center.” Yes, humans still need to be involved in cybersecurity, Wu concedes. But these teams are often understaffed and overcommitted, and they’re susceptible to alert fatigue. An AI model, on the other hand, can come in and sort through attack alerts, performing triage in bulk.
Wu says his tech is designed to sequence more than 100 invocations of large language models. AI ultimately helps work through multiple critical steps involved in investigating a potential breach, coming up with hypotheses and investigating them. The hope is to mimic a real analyst, and Wu says the company doesn’t use any “outsourced” human labor.
More than 300 companies already use the system. But as the company grows, Dropzone is looking for ways it might automate even more cybersecurity work. He imagined where you might have “a team of human engineers and analysts working alongside with an army of AI agents,” he explains. “The human engineers and analysts are providing strategy, which involves assigning tasks to the AI agents.”
Of course, any system designed to mimic a human raises concerns of eliminating jobs. In the cybersecurity world, Wu argues, there just aren’t enough humans to do this in the first place.
“Attackers are starting to leverage AI agents, and it’s just financially impossible for organizations to have enough cybersecurity budget to thoroughly protect themselves,” he says. “As a result of that, with the augmentation of AI agents, we will close the capacity gap between the attackers and the defenders, but not completely.”
This profile is part of Fast Company’s AI 20 for 2026, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AI’s most influential technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers.