Building Community Around the AI SOC Revolution
- Mike Dupuis
- Feb 12
- 3 min read
A Brand Spotlight with Monzy Merza, Co-Founder and CEO of Crogl
The security operations center is at an inflection point. Threat actors are now moving at agentic speed, leveraging AI-driven systems to execute sophisticated campaigns at lower cost and with greater scale than ever before. For defenders, the question is no longer whether AI has a place in security operations. The question is how to implement it responsibly, practically, and effectively. In a conversation with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli for ITSPmagazine, Monzy Merza, Co-Founder and CEO of Crogl, shares how his company is building an autonomous AI SOC agent and why he is bringing the security community together at the inaugural AI SOC Summit.
What Is an AI SOC Agent and Why Does It Matter?
An AI SOC agent is an autonomous system that investigates security alerts on behalf of human analysts, handling the time-consuming work of data correlation, contextual analysis, and triage. Crogl's platform works across multiple data lakes without requiring data normalization, investigating every alert in depth and escalating only the issues that demand human decision-making. Merza describes the platform as a "superhero suit" for SOC analysts, designed to amplify the capabilities of the people doing the real work of defending organizations rather than replace them.
How Are Threat Actors Using Agentic AI to Change the Game?
Merza identifies two critical shifts. First, adversaries are deploying agentic systems to conduct campaigns at machine speed, meaning defenders who operate manually risk being outpaced. Second, the cost of executing a sophisticated attack has dropped dramatically. Agentic systems handle the technical details of crafting convincing phishing emails and automating post-exploitation activity, lowering the barrier to entry for complex campaigns. The volume and sophistication of threats are both increasing simultaneously.
Why Does the Security Community Need the AI SOC Summit?
The AI SOC Summit, held March 3rd at the Hyatt Regency in Tysons, Virginia, is built on a straightforward premise: security practitioners need a place to share real, unfiltered experiences about what works and what does not when it comes to AI in the SOC. The event is intentionally vendor-agnostic and community-driven, with morning keynotes from CISOs discussing practical outcomes and perspectives on AI governance and privacy. The afternoon splits into talk tracks from both startups and established companies, alongside a five-and-a-half-hour hackathon where attendees receive free tokens to experiment with frontier AI models using real security data.
The motivation for the summit came from patterns Merza observed in conversations with customers and community members. Enterprises are actively trying to determine what to buy, what to build, and how to govern AI in their security environments. The AI SOC Summit creates a space for that transparent, practical exchange, with sponsors including reseller partners serving government organizations and industry names like Splunk and Cribl.
Who Should Attend the AI SOC Summit?
Merza outlines four key personas the event serves. SOC analysts at every tier who spend their days buried in alert triage. Security engineers who need to understand how other enterprises are evaluating AI investments. Incident responders and threat hunters who must now track agentic activity alongside traditional human-driven attacks. And builders, the security teams actively prototyping AI capabilities in-house. For each group, the summit provides the chance to learn from what others have tried, understand what constraints led to failures, and test ideas hands-on in a no-pressure environment.
The AI SOC Summit represents a different kind of industry gathering, one where the doers, the analysts, engineers, hunters, and builders who keep organizations secure, are the primary audience rather than an afterthought. In a landscape where agentic AI is already reshaping both sides of the security equation, bringing that community together to share what is real, experiment with what is possible, and build relationships across organizational boundaries may be exactly what the industry needs to move forward with confidence.
Register today at https://aisocsummit.com.
Watch the full spotlight on YouTube.
Listen to the spotlight on Redefining CyberSecurity with Sean Martin.
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