Austin Berglas is the former head of FBI New York Cyber and current Global Head of Professional Services at BlueVoyant.
If machines can detect threats, generate reports and automate responses, why do organizations still need human-led cybersecurity services? The answer is not complicated, but it is frequently misunderstood.
Services are not dying. They are becoming more valuable, and firms that recognize this early will use AI as the accelerant that makes their human expertise irreplaceable.
The Automation Illusion
AI is genuinely transforming security operations. Tools triage alerts, correlate threat intelligence and flag anomalies faster than any analyst. For security operations centers, AI agents can triage alerts to end alert fatigue and autonomously block threats in seconds. When implemented properly, this can be a massive shift.
However, automation handles known problems at speed. It does not handle ambiguity, crisis management, organizational politics, regulatory nuance or the gap between what a tool reports and what a company actually needs to do about it. AI lacks the contextual understanding necessary to interpret novel threats and make nuanced security decisions.
Organizations that understand this distinction are the ones spending more on services, not less. Many companies are turning to managed services providers to help integrate AI-enabled solutions, and CISOs still face key barriers to AI adoption, including a lack of trust, inadequate governance and a lack of standardized policies. Those barriers require human advisors to resolve. Software alone cannot close a trust gap.
Where Human Services Win: Client Retention
Technology vendors lose clients when their product becomes a line item. Service firms that maintain active advisory relationships do not face that problem, because the relationship itself carries value independent of any specific tool.
Cyberday notes that “The consultants who thrive will not be the ones who worked the most hours, they will be the ones who used AI to focus on the work that actually requires their expertise.” This work, strategic guidance, executive communication and risk prioritization, is exactly what keeps clients renewing year after year.
A maturity assessment is not just a deliverable; it is the opening of a conversation. When a consultant hands a client a prioritized roadmap of 30 findings that the client now needs help executing, or they need someone to call when a board member asks an uncomfortable question, they need a firm that knows their environment, their risk tolerance and their internal politics. No AI product provides that. A trusted advisor does and this is called force multiplication.
Many advisors are moving toward vCISO or long-term compliance management services because the operational workload is becoming more manageable with AI assistance, freeing up time for the relationship work that actually drives retention. This is a direct advantage of the business model. Firms that embed themselves as ongoing advisors create recurring revenue and stickiness that transactional vendors cannot replicate.
Where Human Services Win: Product Expansion
Services create the conditions for product adoption and expansion. A client who trusts your team’s judgment on risk will accept your team’s recommendation regarding tooling and infrastructure. A client who only sees you as a vendor will shop every renewal and put their bid out to RFP.
In a security incident at Amazon in July 2025, the official Amazon Q extension for Visual Studio Code was compromised to include a prompt to wipe the user’s home directory and delete all AWS resources. This incident points to the importance of dedicated, sufficiently staffed cybersecurity teams and more broadly, to the danger of over-relying on automated systems without baked-in human oversight.
When incidents like this occur, clients do not call their software vendor’s support line for strategic guidance; they call their trusted advisor. This call is the opportunity to assess, expand and cross-sell. Organizations that have a service relationship in place at the time of a security incident will win additional business from that failure. Vendors who sold a product and walked away will not get the call.
About 10% of cybersecurity job listings now specifically reference AI skills. This indicates that companies are actively trying to build internal AI security competency and need guidance on how to do it. Service firms that can advise on AI security architecture, governance and risk are walking into a greenfield expansion opportunity that pure-play product vendors cannot address.
Where Human Services Win: Platform Adoption
Platforms fail without adoption. This is the most overlooked fact in enterprise security and technology sales. A company can purchase a best-in-class platform and have it underperform for years due to poor configuration, low utilization and lack of internal expertise.
EY research with 500 senior security leaders found that the speed and stakes of AI’s transformation of the enterprise demand a holistic and responsible approach, not just a technology purchase. Organizations buying AI-enabled security platforms still need experts to configure use cases, train analysts, tune detection logic and translate platform output into business decisions. That is a service engagement.
Proper governance is important to increase AI’s potential while mitigating its risks and 78% of organizations have increased their investment in generative AI, particularly in governance. Governance is not a product feature; it is a service. Every platform sale should come with a services layer that drives adoption, ensures the client extracts value and positions your team as the interpreter between the machine’s output and the executive’s decision.
The Structural Advantage
The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates a 29% employment growth for information security analysts from 2024 to 2034, with approximately 16,000 openings per year. The talent shortage is not closing. Organizations cannot hire their way out of it and they will rely on external services to fill the gap indefinitely.
This is not a transitional moment for human-led cybersecurity services; it is a permanent expansion of the services’ scope and importance. AI handles volume and humans handle judgment and the clients, the ones who matter most at the senior level, where decisions are made, still buy from people they trust. Services are not dead. They are the reason any of this works.
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