Threat Intelligence

Is AI Quietly Eroding the Core Skills of Cybersecurity Professionals?

Dark Reading · 28 Oct 2026

Key Takeaway Use AI to support your security work, but make sure someone in your business or your provider still understands the fundamentals well enough to check and challenge what the tools tell you.

Nathan Hamiel has outlined a worrying scenario for security operations teams: as AI tools take over more of the daily work, core technical capabilities could fade. Dark Reading compares the risk to skills many of us have already let slip, such as reading a paper atlas or remembering phone numbers.

The concern is not that AI is useless, but that handing too much to it may leave people less able to do the work themselves. If the tools fail, give a poor answer or are unavailable, a team that has lost its hands-on skills may struggle to notice or respond.

The source summary is brief and does not go into specific examples or recommendations. Even so, the warning is relevant for small businesses that are starting to rely on AI features in their security products or on outside providers that use them.

AI SecOps cybersecurity skills Dark Reading

Summarised by CISO AI from Dark Reading, written with Claude Sonnet 5.5. We link back to every original so you can read it yourself.