A top cybersecurity official at the State Department said Tuesday that the agency is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to “buy back time” for the cyber workforce.
During a Federal News Network webinar titled “Paying down the cyber skills debt,” State Department Deputy Assistant Director for Cyber Threat and Investigations Ray Romano explained that the workforce is using AI broader than large language models (LLMs) to help increase efficiency.
“We truly believe that artificial intelligence can be an aide to our cyber workforce,” Romano said. “We look at it a little bit broader than just [LLMs]. That’s absolutely part of the conversation. But we are actually looking towards getting to automation.”
“We’re looking at anything that we can to buy back time for our employees. Our analysts, our SOC analysts, our threat intelligence analysts, our threat hunters, they just have too much work and there are just things that are not getting done,” he said. “We’re looking at all of our high-fidelity alerts, but our mediums and our lows aren’t getting as much love as maybe they should.”
Romano emphasized that AI can help the cyber workforce at the State Department automate some of its workflows, but that “we’re not there yet.”
“We’re in the in the crawl stage of crawl, walk, and run,” he said.
Romano highlighted that AI will be helpful to combat burnout amongst the cyber workforce, and that all leaders should be focused on this initiative.
“Once you get into the position of leadership, if you’re not focused on the workforce you’re just not going to be successful in this space,” Romano said. “There’s always a topic of burnout that comes up and employee morale. Burnout is not going away in cyber. It’s going to live with us.”
“This is not a project delivery where as soon as we get to that July 1 delivery date, we can all breathe for a couple of weeks. That breath doesn’t exist in cyber; we have to be on 24/7,” he said. “You have to be right every time – the bad guy just has to be right once. We have to really focus on how to keep our folks’ morale high, worry about burnout, but you really truly as leadership in this space have to worry about your people and be focused on your employees and your staff.”
