What if the real question isn’t “Do you need an AI SOC?” but “Are your alerts actually any good?” In this episode, Alex and Dennis Chow (Director of SecOps Engineering at UKG) and co-author of Automating Security Detection Engineering break down the uncomfortable truth: if your alerts are fundamentally weak, no AI system will save you.

Dennis walks through how he evaluates when alerts move from unmanageable to stable, the metrics that determine whether automation is genuinely safe, and how his team built a multi-agent pipeline on GCP capable of consuming alert volume at a rate no human team could match. He shows what automation can realistically achieve from scaling L1/L2 investigations to reclaiming analyst hours and where it still depends on skilled detection engineering.

They also tackle the real decision point for leaders: when does it make sense to buy an AI SOC vendor that handles both detection development and triage, and when is it just a GPT wrapper dressed as a solution?

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Code validity: November 30, 2025

Detection Engineering Dispatch features candid conversations with security teams at top companies on how they build, measure, and scale world-class detection programs.