TL;DR
AI has become inescapable. Organizations everywhere are spending billions of dollars as they rush to integrate AI capabilities across their products and workflows. The prevailing notion is that if you aren’t using AI in some way, you may already be behind.
But how transformative is AI actually? Although it’s only been a few years since LLMs like GPT caught the world by storm, cracks are already starting to show. Despite the promise of the technology, some organizations are questioning their investments. In fact, studies are showing that as many as 95 percent of businesses are getting zero returns from AI. All this raises the question: Will AI live up to its promise? Or will it fall victim to its hype?
For Will McMillan, an AI consultant and Cybrary course creator, this is the wrong question entirely. Instead of asking what value AI will give them, businesses should be asking how they can get value out of AI. “If you put bad data in, you’re going to get bad outputs,” explained McMillan. “Individuals need to understand how to use AI for the benefit of the business, and businesses need to know how to integrate AI into existing processes.”
This is how McMillan believes AI will ultimately deliver the most value — and why he’s developed a whole series of AI courses to help you and your organization get there.
Building a strong foundation
When you boil it down, our current problem with AI is simple: Many organizations think that, in order to start reaping its benefits, all they have to do is slap AI on top of their current processes. But McMillan argues that this misses the point of the technology. Instead of it being a quick shortcut to productivity, businesses should take the time to understand how AI works so that they can make it not just a tool, but a means for collaboration.
“A lot of people think AI replaces people,” he said. “But really one of the key things it does is help people work with each other.” But getting to this point, McMillan pointed out, means knowing the fundamentals that make AI work.
This is why his AI courses begin with topics such as AI System Basics and Types of AI. The goal isn’t just to make you familiar with the terminology and technology, but to give you the foundation you’ll need later on to build your own unique, high-value use cases with that AI. “I wanted to make sure that a lot of thought was put into these first courses so that, as you get deeper into the more complex lessons, you’ll know exactly how to apply it to your organization’s own initiatives.”
This can particularly be seen with AI Best Practices, which McMillan created in order to help you build sustainable, productive, and repeatable processes with AI. “It’s basically a practical playbook for scoping and prompting and testing,” he said. “The idea is to help you standardize and build up structure, while ensuring you have safety.”
Even for those well-versed in AI, McMillan believes these foundational courses will be beneficial. “They might know a lot, but if they’ve never sat and thought about how to work collaboratively with AI, then they might not be getting the most out of it. These courses will help change that.”
Strengthening individual roles through AI
It’s important to not only know how to use AI, but how to also apply it to the unique needs of your role. This, McMillan was unequivocal about, can you put you at a distinct advantage. “If you spend the time to understand AI and how it can improve your work,” he said, “then you will stand out.”
While this is true across many different fields, having a deep knowledge of AI can be particularly useful within cybersecurity. For instance, an AI assistant can help turn large incident reports from time-consuming tasks to focused, actionable lists by quickly extracting the information each team or individual needs. This, McMillan pointed out, can help organizations resolve incidents faster by making it easier to address different aspects at the same time and work collaboratively.
Likewise, AI can help dramatically increase response rates. Take the example of a security engineer. When investigating an incident, they will have to check for abnormalities across a wide set of logs using a toolset, a process that can take hours or even days. But with AI integrated into their workflow, this changes. “Instead of the engineer having to log into the portal, go through the GUI, scroll through the logs, it's like you're using something that's running at hyperspeed to get the information faster back to you,” said McMillan. “It’s like your investigation partner.”
Knowing how to integrate AI effectively is the focus of McMillan’s AI for Incident Responders course. The goal is to not only show how you can resolve issues faster and get the business operating smoothly again, but to help showcase your value as well. McMillan will soon be releasing several other AI courses for different careers, such as Security Engineers, Red Teams, and GRC Analysts.
Preparing cybersecurity for AI
Effective AI integration shouldn’t stop at individual roles. In order to reap the full benefits of the technology, while ensuring your data and organization remains safe, it’s important to also consider how AI fits into your organization’s larger cybersecurity strategy.
This fits into McMillan’s original concern about realizing value from AI. Just like slapping AI on top of existing workflows won’t likely produce noticeable returns, it also won’t prepare your organization for the security vulnerabilities that AI can potentially introduce. These include the threats that can come from unauthorized AI usage, data privacy and regulatory violations, and AI-specific malware. Fortunately, McMillan designed his course series to take all this into account.
“These courses don’t just build on theoretical foundations, but operational foundations,” he said. “Everything that you’re implementing ties into your SOC or your IT workflows. This helps you produce solutions that your teams can use.”
For example, in AI Security Lifecycle, written by Raghu Bala, users will learn how to properly prepare data for AI deployment, monitoring, and governance. It will also provide guidance and frameworks for AI risk management so that organizations can safeguard their AI models and data within their environments.
Future courses will cover even more ground, including how to properly vet AI tools, how to promote end-user AI security awareness, and more.
Make AI work for you
The AI landscape is evolving quickly. As organizations try to keep up, more are realizing what it takes to get real value from this technology. For today’s workers, this means it has become increasingly essential to understand how AI works, both at a fundamental level and across individual roles, so that they can integrate AI more effectively into the organization.
So whether you’re new to AI entirely or have been using it for years, McMillan’s courses can help take you a step closer to realizing the full potential of AI. Get started by heading over to our course catalog and signing up for AI Technical Foundations, AI for Cybersecurity Roles, and AI for Cybersecurity.
