How Cybersecurity Professionals Are Using Generative AI

February 12, 2026

The use of generative AI at work has created a strange paradox. It is estimated that 16 percent of people around the world used it at some point in the second half of 2025. But many of us are still trying to figure out where, exactly, it adds value to our work, and most of us don’t know how our colleagues use it.

Generative AI has had a big impact on the work of one set of professionals in particular: cybersecurity specialists. It supercharges attacks, while also offering new tools to fight those attacks. That makes generative AI a source of risk and an opportunity to create new ways to work.

So, let’s focus on those new opportunities. We asked cybersecurity experts how generative AI has transformed the way they work. Here are their answers.

How has generative AI changed the way you approach solving problems in your field?

IEEE Senior Member Elyson De La Cruz: From a research standpoint, AI enables me to correlate large volumes of cybersecurity telemetry data from certain tools and to craft preliminary designs for initiatives such as zero-trust and cloud security architectures.

What’s something you can do now that simply wasn’t possible before generative AI?

IEEE Senior Member Shrinath Thube: I can run quick security simulations or generate realistic test data in seconds. Before the advent of generative AI, such a setup required extensive scripting and domain-specific knowledge. Now, I can ask an AI model to mimic specific traffic patterns or threat behaviors and get usable results almost instantly. It’s a huge accelerator for research and testing.

Where does the human still matter most in your AI workflows?

IEEE Member Eleanor “Nell” Watson: Humans remain essential for specifying values, interpreting context and spotting alignment failures that present as plausible outputs but violate implicit norms. Human judgment differentiates genuine reasoning from sophisticated pattern mimicry — distinguishing meaningful understanding from what I call “pretty squawks.”

If you could fix one misconception people have about generative AI, what would it be?

De La Cruz: One of the current misconceptions is that generative AI replaces expertise. The value of AI still depends on our ability to ask the right questions within the context of a particular domain, and reason through the results.

Go Deeper: In 2026, AI agents will become standard in business environments, eliminating repetitive and routine work. That’s according to the IEEE Computer Society’s 2026 Technology Predictions Report, which identifies the megatrends that will change the world for years to come.