• Why aren’t analysts talking about burnout? Probably because they’re too busy living through it.
• Every alert feels urgent, every system is critical and the threats never stop coming. The constant grind is leaving SOC teams feeling worn out and utterly depleted.
• But with smarter, practical applications of AI on the rise, relief is finally within reach. 

SOC teams are exhausted—and burnout just keeps rising. With a growing shortage of experienced professionals and the constant pressure of securing every critical system bearing down, analysts are stretched beyond their limits. SOC teams are facing a flurry of false positives while real threats race ahead, unchecked. It’s no surprise 71% of analysts report serious burnout, and over half have considered walking away. 

Still, two in three (66%) believe half their workload could be automated. And that’s not wishful thinking—it’s an opening for AI (not the scary, job-stealing kind) to step in and streamline what’s weighing teams down. When leveraged for good instead of evil, AI can power incident summaries and automate game-changing workflows to help bust the alerts chasing down your SOC team (in real life and in their nightmares).

Why SOC teams are stretched thin

Even though SOC teams try to keep up, 69% report being understaffed, and 60% say their workload has increased in the past year. But it’s not just more work they’re facing, it’s complexity coming at them from every angle, including the tools meant to serve them. That doesn’t go over so well for 67% of organizations experiencing a moderate-to-critical skills gap in their teams lacking real industry experience. As a result, analysts lose too much time on manual investigations and reporting, leaving them with little room for strategy, threat hunting or even recovery. 

Resource-strapped analysts are doing everything they can to brave the daily onslaught of alerts, but it's taking a deep toll on their mental health. The constant stress leads to cybersecurity fatigue, with raising anxiety and burnout hitting employees in high-stakes sectors like IT and finance especially hard. 

And when teams are overworked and under-supported, things get ugly:

• Threats slip through.
• Crucial context gets missed.
• Mental health takes a nosedive.
• Productivity goes out the window.

No wonder just 14% of organizations are confident their professionals have the skills to meet their cybersecurity objectives (yikes). All of this is clearly unsustainable, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. 

How AI helps SOC teams bust burnout

There’s plenty of hype around AI (and skepticism too), but we’re not talking about replacing SOC teams or promising a fully autonomous SOC (ew)—we’re talking about how a smart sidekick can support your SOC. Something more like a helpful working hand and less like a rogue (bound-to-turn-against-you) machine. 

The right AI can realistically help lighten the load by:

• Providing analysts with the high-fidelity data they need to take informed action, faster.
• Automating workflows to take care of repetitive tasks like incident reporting that drain your team’s energy.
• Predicting likely attack chains, efficiently taking the mystery out of endpoint protection.
• Shedding light on meaningful environmental context, so your team can respond faster.
• Explaining tools and why they matter, bridging skill gaps for junior analysts.
• Instantly answering questions like, “Have we detected XYZ in our environment?”

“Good” AI doesn’t replace people—it removes roadblocks so your team can do what it does best: defend, respond and stay ahead of APTs (not to mention, catch a break).

Real help, right when you need it 

AI might not eliminate every single SOC challenge, but it can give your analysts the support they deserve. With the right players on their side, your team can manage complex threats better and faster. The AI-powered tools buffing Symantec Endpoint protections give your teams back valuable time, so they can stay focused on human stuff. 

• Symantec Endpoint Security’s (SES’s) SymantecAI chatbot, now enhanced with natural language processing, arms your analysts with information from protection bulletins, threat-intel blogs and MITRE—with just a simple query. Instead of sifting through overwhelming dashboards, your team gets straight answers and real-time support for their investigations.
• Incident Prediction, a key feature of Symantec Endpoint Security Complete, gives your team a confident glimpse into the future at an attacker’s four to five next likely moves—making sure they’re ready before anything goes wrong. Drawing on historical data, threat behavior patterns and telemetry from your own environment, it surfaces patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed.
• SES’s Incident Summarization feature uses GenAI to instantly deliver a clear, structured summary of an entire incident, right from the Incidents page. This gives analysts fast context to better understand what happened so they can think through next steps quicker, without wading through mountains of raw data.

In the end, it’s not about replacing the people who power your security, because analysts aren’t the problem. Burnout is. And AI can make their job a whole lot easier, offering them much-needed backup when they need it the most. 

Don’t let fatigue burn a hole in your SOC—get Incident Prediction and SymantecAI on your side and cross burnout off your threat list. To see how Incident Prediction works, watch the on-demand webinar: AI’s Tactical Edge: Predicting Your Attacker’s Next Moves.