Leveraging AI and Human Insights in Email Security

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) vs. Human Insights (HI) debate has been discussed a lot in the past few years. There is no doubt that AI can outperform humans in specific areas and even beat the human world champion in chess. However, AI algorithms still have a very long way to go to match the human brain’s capacity. And despite the fact that AI systems were modeled and trained to mimic human behavior, they, too, make logical judgments like we can.

The ability of AI to make decisions is mostly based on inputs, i.e., the data they’re trained on, so no matter how good your models are, they are only as good as your data!

AI vs. HI, what is the future of Email security?

AI needs significantly more time to adjust to new situations. In a fast-moving domain like cyber security, where millions of new threats are created on a daily basis, the relevance and quality of the data we used to train our models are debatable, while it has a lot of value in stopping and even predicting future threats it is still one step behind since as I have mentioned earlier, they are still not able to make logical judgments like we can on events we didn’t use in our training sets.

What is the role of HI in an AI world?

The combination of HI and AI is powerful when done right. AI’s speed and computing capabilities outperform what the human brain can do, and on the other hand, the human brain and HI are in constant need to ensure we feed AI with the right data.

HI is the driver behind the wheel. It enjoys the assistance of AI with the important, yet simple, tasks like keeping the car at the right speed and inside the lane. But AI is heavily relying on the driver to pump the brake when an unexpected event occurs to feed it with a new set of data that it can retrain so it is more prepared for the next event.

Will AI be able to take over eventually?

Maybe, but we are not there yet. As for now, we should keep our hands on the wheel. Even if AI is doing OK in 99%, in some areas (commute or cyber security), we cannot risk the 1% where it is wrong--we simply can’t afford it.

We invite you to download our new report, "The Business Cost of Phishing," where you can discover the true cost of phishing on organizations as well as what IT and Security professionals believe is coming next.  You can get the report at https://secure.ironscales.com/the-business-cost-of-phishing/report-download