A Cybersecurity AI Assistant: The Pricey Addition You Don’t Need—Or Do You?

You’ve probably seen all the buzz lately—announcements about cybersecurity AI assistants promising to revolutionize the way companies defend against threats. With so much noise in the industry, it’s tough to know whether an AI assistant is worth the investment or just an expensive gimmick. In this 2-part blog, let’s dive into what these AI assistants offer and whether they’re worth your time—and money.

But before we dive into the details, let’s shift our perspective a bit. Instead of seeing an AI assistant as another tool in your stack, try thinking of it as a virtual teammate. It’s not just about automating tasks or crunching data—it’s about having an extra set of eyes, brains and hands (or algorithms) that can spot threats, offer insights, and work alongside your team. You can talk to AI assistant in natural language, and ask it questions or to do stuff for you, just like you would interact with a colleague. When viewed as a teammate, the AI becomes less of an add-on and more of an integral part of your cybersecurity strategy, helping to increase risk response speed, fill gaps, reduce burnout, and let your human experts focus on what they do best.

One more thing to remember: different roles need different things from an AI assistant. The CISO is busy with strategic decisions and high impact items, while the Head of Vulnerability Management is focused on timely mitigation for emerging risk items. The IT team could use some automation and better prioritization to free up their patching workload. Meanwhile, the BU heads want to keeping operations running smoothly at acceptable levels of cyber risk, and the CFO looks for a solid return on investment. Each of these roles need something different from their AI assistants.

Let’s see how each role benefits with some hard numbers. In this part 1 of the blog, we will consider ROI from the CISO’s perspective, from that of a Head of Vulnerability Management and the perspective of an IT person responsible for patching. Additional roles will be considered in parts 2 of this blog.

The ROI of a Cybersecurity AI Assistant: A Strategic Advantage for CISOs

The #1 benefit that a cybersecurity AI assistant brings to a CISO is improved access to timely information and actionable insights, which leads to enhanced situational awareness. Remember the last time you asked your team for specific analysis or insight, and how incredibly frustrating it was to wait weeks before you got the answers you were looking for. AI assistants streamline data collection, analysis, and reporting, ensuring that the CISO has a clear, real-time view of the organization’s security posture, and can make the right decisions in a timely manner. How does this translate to ROI?

1. Opportunity Cost: A CISO waiting on data is not making strategic decisions that could protect the organization or optimize security resources. If critical initiatives are delayed by a week, this can affect the rollout of new security measures, leading to a potential increase in risks or missed savings. For a large enterprise, a week’s delay in executing a cost-saving security measure could result in $50,000 to $100,000 in lost savings, depending on the scale of operations.
2. Productivity Loss: Delays cause productivity bottlenecks. If a CISO or senior security leader is spending 10-15% of their time chasing data or waiting for reports, that’s potentially $24,000 to $36,000 in wasted salary costs annually (assuming a $240,000 salary). This doesn’t include the downstream effects of delayed decision-making on the rest of the team.
3. Incident Escalation Costs: In cases where delayed decisions lead to escalated incidents, the cost of incident response can dramatically increase. If faster decision-making could prevent a mid-level incident from escalating, it might save the organization $100,000 to $500,000 in response and recovery costs, depending on the severity of the incident.
4. Increased Breach Risk: Ultimately, delayed decisions can extend the exposure window for your organization, increasing the risk of a breach. For example, if a decision is delayed by just a few days, it could lead to missed opportunities to patch critical vulnerabilities. The average cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million. Even a 5% increased likelihood of a breach due to delays could cost an organization an additional $222,500 per incident.
5. Regulatory Penalties: Delayed decisions and actions can result in regulatory penalties. The SEC has increased its focus on timely disclosures of material cybersecurity incidents. Failing to address vulnerabilities quickly or report breaches promptly can lead to hefty fines, personal liability and related costs. These penalties can range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

To summarize ROI of a cybersecurity assistant for a CISO, the impact of delayed decisions due to slow access to data can easily reach a few million dollars per year, considering increased missed opportunities, productivity losses, escalated incident costs, breach risks and regulatory penalties. A cybersecurity assistant can help you unlock these efficiencies.

The ROI of a Cybersecurity AI Assistant: A Head of Vulnerability Management’s Perspective

As a Head of Vulnerability Management, you face an overwhelming challenge: the volume of vulnerabilities continues to rise, and with the increasing focus on exposure management, the workload will only grow. (For 2024, we are projecting that EM teams will need to address 30,700 vulnerabilities (CVEs) and 72,000 non-CVE exposures for a total of 102,700 total exposures.) Unfortunately, you can’t hire your way out of this problem. The shortage of cybersecurity talent, combined with the high cost of skilled professionals, makes expanding your team impractical. An AI assistant isn’t just a smart investment—it’s a necessity. Here’s how an AI assistant can provide significant ROI by boosting efficiency, reducing costs, and helping your team stay ahead.

1. Boosting Team Efficiency: AI assistants for your team can automate time-consuming tasks like vulnerability scanning and prioritization, increasing your team’s efficiency by up to 60%. This means your team can manage more vulnerabilities without needing extra staff, allowing them to focus on the most critical issues. With exposure management becoming a top priority, your workload will only intensify, and your AI virtual workforce will ensures that your team can keep up.
2. Better Prioritization: With the sheer volume of vulnerabilities to manage, prioritizing effectively is crucial. AI assistants can help you analyze threats and dynamically prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of exploitation by up to 50%. This ensures your team focuses on the vulnerabilities that matter most, lowering your organization’s breach risk. Addressing the most critical vulnerabilities can save millions by avoiding breaches.
3. Scaling Without Extra Costs: Hiring more staff isn’t a viable option. With cybersecurity roles remaining vacant for months and the cost of skilled professionals soaring, scaling your team to meet demand isn’t feasible. An AI assistant can scale your team’s capabilities without adding to your payroll, saving you $260,000 to $390,000 annually by avoiding additional 2-3 hires (assuming a fully loaded cost of $130K/hire). AI lets you scale without hiring more people, cutting payroll and overhead costs.
4. Reducing Incident Costs: Unpatched vulnerabilities are a leading cause of incidents and breaches, and the cost of those breaches can be devastating. Faster exposure response reduces the number of incidents you need to deal with and the risk of costly breaches. AI assistants can help you by speeding up the risk remediation/mitigation process, reducing the chance of exploitation and potentially saving your organization $445,000 per incident avoided.
5. Simplifying Compliance: As exposure management grows in importance, so does the complexity of maintaining compliance. Your AI assistants can help you with compliance reporting, reducing the time your team spends on audits by 30-50%. This saves time and resources while helping avoid costly fines.
6. Strategic Decision-Making: Your personal AI assistant can constantly provide actionable insights, helping you make smarter strategic decisions. By analyzing trends and predicting future risks, your AI asssiatant empowers you to allocate resources more effectively and refine your security strategy, keeping you ahead of the curve.

With the ongoing cybersecurity talent shortage and the increasing focus on exposure management, there is no other choice but to turn to AI. You can’t hire your way out of this challenge, and the workload will only continue to grow. A cybersecurity AI assistant is essential for boosting efficiency, reducing costs, and ensuring your team stays ahead of threats. The ROI is clear: AI enables you to do more with less, protect your organization, and navigate an increasingly complex security landscape.

ROI to IT Folks: Long Overdue Relief 

For IT professionals tasked with patching vulnerabilities, fixing misconfigurations and hardening IT assets for cybersecurity, the pressure is constant. Managing security while juggling multiple priorities can feel like a race against time, especially with a growing arrival rate of new vulnerabilities combined with a huge backlog. A cybersecurity AI assistant can be the reliable coworker you’ve always needed, helping streamline the patching process and easing the burden.

1. Time Savings Through Automation: AI assistants can automate up to 60% of routine patch management tasks, including vulnerability research, prioritization, and patch deployment. This automation can reduce the time spent on patching by 50%. For an IT professional who spends, for example, 20 hours a week on patch management, this means saving 10 hours per week, or 520 hours annually — equivalent to over 13 weeks of work saved each year.
2. Cost Savings Through Reduced Workload: Not all vulnerabilities are equal, but it can be challenging to push back when it is clear to you that the patch/fix is unnecessary. An AI assistant can help you bring context to the equation, analyzing factors like the effect of compensating controls and potential impact of downtime to related applications/workloads. This means you can focus on the most pressing issues, reducing the likelihood of missing critical patches and keeping your systems more secure, and not get bogged down in issues that don’t matter.Note to CIO: The productivity gains from better prioritization can translate directly into cost savings. If an IT professional’s fully loaded cost (including salary, benefits, and overhead) is approximately $100,000 annually, saving 50% of their patch management time could result in $50,000 in cost savings per year, per person. For a team of 10 IT professionals, this could add up to $500,000 in annual savings.
3. Instant Communication and Automation: Coordinating patching with other teams often leads to delays in risk remediation. Your AI assistant can help eliminate these delays by automating communication, assigning tasks, and providing real-time updates, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. This can speed up remediation time by up to 60%, freeing up time for other important IT responsibilities while sharply reducing the organization’s cyber risk.
4. Avoiding Costly Mistakes: In the high-pressure world of patch management, mistakes happen. Your AI assistant can help you minimize the risk by ensuring patches are applied correctly and on time, reducing human error by 50%. This can save your organization from costly incidents like breaches and downtime.
5. Enhancing Your Role: Your cybersecurity AI-assistant doesn’t just save time—it enhances your role. With mundane tasks automated, you can focus on higher-level projects, making your work more fulfilling and advancing your career by allowing you to shine in areas where your expertise is needed.

In summary, an AI assistant saves you time, reduces stress, and helps you deliver better outcomes, making it an essential investment for your efficiency and career growth. These numbers add up quickly and affect >70% of your daily work time.

Conclusion

To conclude, a cybersecurity AI assistant might seem like a pricey addition, but the value it delivers can far outweigh the cost. For CISOs, the assistant’s ability to provide real-time insights, reduce decision-making delays, and optimize risk management can prevent costly breaches and regulatory penalties, easily saving millions annually. For vulnerability and exposure management leaders, AI assistants are the only way to scale their teams and keep up with the explosion of the attack surface. IT professionals benefit from automation that saves time, reduces workloads, and minimizes errors, translating into significant cost savings and improved security outcomes.

Whether it’s enhancing situational awareness, automating patch management, or filling critical control gaps, a cybersecurity AI assistant acts as a proactive, strategic teammate rather than just another tool. In a landscape where threats continue to evolve and the cost of incidents remains high, investing in AI is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity for staying ahead and ensuring long-term resilience.

In part 2 of this blog, we’ll continue exploring the ROI of a cybersecurity AI assistant from the business’ and the CFO’s perspectives. Stay tuned to see how this technology can bring value across your organization. In the meantime, if you would like to know more about Balbix’s cybersecurity assistant BIX or about the Balbix platform, please visit Balbix.com and request a demo.