Killing the Playbook with Agentic AI with Allan Alford and Tom Findling

About this episode

The episode discusses the limitations of traditional playbooks in SOC and how Agentic AI is transforming the operational model.

SOAR promised to close the loop in the SOC and fell flat. Agentic AI is finally delivering what a decade of playbooks couldn’t. In this episode, Ron sits down with Allan Alford, SVP at NTT Global Data Centers, and Tom Findling, co-founder and CEO of Conifers.ai. They cover why static playbooks broke under real-world conditions and how agentic systems are flipping the SOC operating model. They get into hallucination guardrails, human-on-the-loop versus human-in-the-loop, and the QR-code phishing investigation an agent solved on its own without being told how. The conversation closes on trust thresholds, the speed of enterprise adoption, and Allan's blunt warning to any CISO trying to slow this train down… you're already on the tracks. Impactful Moments00:00 - Intro02:30 - Why the lazy sysadmin always wins05:15 - Why SOAR fell flat08:00 - Guardrails, hallucinations, and showing the work13:00 - The SOC AI holy grail15:30 - The moment you start saying we17:30 - QR-code phishing the agent solved alone19:00 - Why playbooks were never going to scale28:00 - Earning trust at enterprise scale33:30 - Stand in front of this revolution and lose35:40 - Risk quantification on business steroids…

People in this episode

Host: Ron

Guests: Allan Alford, Tom Findling

Topics covered

• Agentic AI
• SOC operating model
• playbooks
• trust thresholds
• enterprise adoption

Keywords

• Agentic AI
• SOC
• playbooks
• trust thresholds
• QR-code phishing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NTT Global Data Centers, Conifers.ai

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