Reinharz Unfiltered: Looking Back on the Pre-AI Era of Security Monitoring

The same truth applies here. What we once called “monitoring” was really just watching, hoping, reacting, and recording. It was human endurance pitted against boredom and fatigue. It was a process that looked important but rarely produced real security. Those rooms represented an era of human limitation. And like every previous industrial revolution, technology has arrived to remove the friction.

The shift we are experiencing today is not accidental. It is a predictable byproduct of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the one driven by artificial intelligence and autonomy. Every revolution before this replaced the repetitive with the reliable. The same pattern is unfolding now, and in hindsight, it was inevitable. AI was always going to find its way into security, because no industry spends more time staring at screens that rarely show anything of consequence.

Still, change never comes easy. I have watched the same push and pull that every transformative technology faces: denial versus early embrace. It mirrors the reaction to electricity, to the automobile, to the internet. The first instinct of any industry that depends on human labor is to defend that dependency. Many organizations chose to ignore the shift, to argue that AI could never match “human intuition.” They said the same thing about calculators and word processors. History tends to rhyme that way.

When I look back at the early days of RAD’s SARA, the multiple award-winning agentic AI platform for security monitoring, I remember the first time she performed a task that once required a human. It was mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming. Yet she did it faster, more accurately, and at a fraction of the cost. That was the moment I knew the model had changed forever. Agentic AI exists for precisely that reason. It handles the tasks that are essential but not fulfilling. It removes the cost of human fatigue and replaces it with precision that never tires. That vision came fully to life during my recent demonstration of SARA at The Monitoring Association’s 75th Annual Meeting earlier this month. Watching seasoned industry professionals witness, in real time, an AI autonomously manage live security events was validation that this shift is not coming, it is here.

The results have been undeniable. Monitoring centers that once needed dozens of operators can now deliver higher performance with fewer people and better consistency. The human role has evolved. Instead of watching endless screens, operators now supervise AI agents that never blink. They intervene when context or discretion is needed, not when routine is mistaken for vigilance. This is not a loss of human contribution; it is a redirection of it.

We are still early, but it already feels similar to those moments in history when the world began to realize it was changing. Think about how absurd some past norms now seem. There was a time when people smoked on airplanes, when we thought typewriters were the pinnacle of office productivity, when overnight delivery was the fastest way to share information, when typing classes were considered essential education. We laugh at those ideas now, yet they were once as ordinary as today’s monitoring rooms filled with people staring at video walls.

Someday soon, we will look back the same way at security monitoring as it was before agentic AI. The idea of paying someone to stare at a screen for eight hours, hoping to catch a fleeting moment of importance, will seem as outdated as sending a fax or dictating a memo to a secretary. The progress will feel obvious in hindsight, even though it took years of persistence, skepticism, and a few bruises along the way.

What we are really witnessing is not just a technological upgrade, but an industry growing up. Security has always lagged a generation behind the rest of technology. It is finally catching up, and in some cases, leading. The impact of agentic AI in this sector will ripple far beyond security. It will redefine expectations for accuracy, efficiency, and accountability across all forms of human supervision.

For me, that is what makes this moment extraordinary. It is not about creating a product; it is about witnessing a transformation. SARA just happens to be the first agentic AI to conquer an entire industry. There will be many more that follow. Each will bring new capabilities and redefine what work means in its domain. But security will always have the distinction of being among the first fields to prove what AI can achieve when it is designed to assist rather than replace.

As I look at the trajectory of this revolution, I am filled with a sense of perspective. A century ago, the telephone operator was replaced by automation. Today, the security operator is evolving into something new. an orchestrator of intelligent agents. And someday, we will wonder why it took us so long to get here.

I am honored to be part of that evolution, to witness an industry shift from reaction to intelligence, from fatigue to focus. We are standing at the inflection point where human ingenuity meets autonomous precision, and I cannot help but feel grateful to play a role in the revolution that is changing everything.

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