Introduction
If cybersecurity today were a game, it wouldn’t be chess. It would be chess on a clock, played at blitz speed, every move pressing seconds away. On one side of the clock sits AI: fast, mechanical, relentless. On the other side, humans: slower, more deliberate, sometimes stubborn, but carrying the weight of responsibility.
Every incident is a race against time. The clock ticks. AI makes the quick moves. Humans decide when the game has changed. And the final press of the clock—when systems shut down, customers are blocked, or entire operations are at stake, remains firmly in human hands.
AI: The Blitz Player
When the first alerts light up, AI is like a rookie intern with endless caffeine—sorting, tagging, and running the opening drills no human has patience for. Continuous monitoring, correlating alerts, and repetitive responses are what machines were made for.
“AI excels at repetitive monitoring,” said Jorge Albor (PUERTO DE BARRANQUILLA, Database Administrator), “but the moment stakes get high, humans must take over.”
AI can handle the endless flood of alerts that would drown a SOC analyst. It can classify, filter, and prioritize faster than any team. It can draw connections no one would see in real time. But blitz play only gets you so far.
Because the moment an “anomaly” turns out to be your CEO logging in from a hotel in Dubai, or worse, a customer transaction that AI flags as fraud, the clock has to slam back into human hands.
Humans: The Guardians of Context
Where AI stops is exactly where human judgment begins. Because a firewall doesn’t live in isolation; it lives inside a business, a culture, and a reputation.
Antonio Martinez (CORPACERO COLOMBIA, Chief Information Officer) captured it bluntly:
“I would never leave critical incident response decisions solely in the hands of AI.”
Pulling the plug on production isn’t just about servers, it’s about canceling flights, halting bank transfers, or locking out thousands of customers mid-transaction. No algorithm should own that kind of fallout.
Erik Castaño Camacho (EXPRESO BRASILIA COLOMBIA, IT Infrastructure Coordinator) put it plainly:
“Only humans can weigh the real impact on operations and reputation.”
And when the stakes involve legal, political, or cultural factors, the last line of defense must always involve a human. Vipin Saurabh Singh (MINISTRY OF INTERIOR – QATAR, Network Security Specialist) emphasized this point:
“In environments where national security and cultural sensitivity are involved, no algorithm should ever make the final call.”
What Machines Can’t Feel
Beyond strategy and context, there is something uniquely human: intuition.
That gut feeling that something is “off,” long before data confirms it, is a survival skill that no machine can reproduce.
Andrés Reina (POSSE HERRERA RUIZ ABOGADOS, IT Infrastructure Analyst) highlighted it:
“AI is incredible at finding patterns we might miss, but when it comes to decisions that could shut down our business or affect customer trust, human judgment is non-negotiable.”
Others pointed to qualities like trust and ethics, things machines can’t calculate.
Christian Noel Calix Medina (BANCO FICOHSA, Cybersecurity Team Lead) summed it up:
“Ethics and accountability cannot be automated. Responsibility for these decisions must stay with people.”
Trust and ethics don’t live in log files. They live in boardrooms, in news headlines, and in the gut feeling of a security lead who knows tomorrow’s breach could cost their career.
The Shared Clock
The lesson from Radware Link members is not that AI is dangerous or that humans are flawless. It’s that resilience comes from both sides of the clock.
AI accelerates detection and response. It frees humans from the mechanical grind of triage. It buys precious time.
Humans spend that time on what really matters: context, trust, business continuity, reputation, and ethics.
Machines may win on speed, but humans decide when the match ends. Cybersecurity isn’t just about fast moves; it’s about the courage to stop the clock and take responsibility for the final one.