AI Is Reshaping Red Teaming: Smaller Offensive Teams Now Do the Work of Much Larger Ones

A senior voice in offensive security argues that the last eighteen months have changed red teaming more than most organisations realise. The shift is not that attackers became smarter. It is that the economics of attack changed. According to the article, a small, well-equipped team using frontier AI models can now outperform what a much larger traditional team could achieve just two years ago.

The author says public debate about AI in security tends to focus on defence, such as better anomaly detection, faster triage and AI-assisted analysts in security operations centres. He argues this misses the more urgent story. In his view, AI-augmented work has moved from a nice-to-have to a non-negotiable requirement for red teams, and teams that do not use it are already at a disadvantage. He also warns that wider access to powerful AI models creates an imbalance between well-equipped adversaries and defenders who still rely on manual triage.

The piece notes that AI is no longer just used to write phishing emails. Both organisations and threat actors are adopting a structured approach to use AI across every phase of the attack chain. The productivity figures cited come from DayBlink Consulting engagements over ten years, and were validated by author Robert Pimentel as representative of his own red team experience. This summary covers only the opening of the article.