AI Demo Talk On "Task Driven Agents For Investigation, Response, Analysis and More!" With Steve Povolny (Senior Director, Security Research & Competitive Intelligence at Exabeam).

In today’s cybersecurity landscape, where analysts are overwhelmed by data and threats evolve faster than manual processes can handle, task-driven AI agents are emerging as game-changers. This AI Demo Talk featured Steve Povolny (Senior Director, Security Research & Competitive Intelligence, Exabeam), who demonstrated how agentic platforms use AI-powered assistants to augment investigations, accelerate response, and deliver CISO-level insights.

Key Highlights:

- AI-Driven Investigations: Live demo of a conversational agent performing detection-specific analysis.
- CISO-Level Advisor: Showcasing an agent that delivers strategic insights and security posture analysis.
- NLP-Powered Orchestration: Demonstrating natural language queries to run complex searches and generate visualizations in seconds.

About Speaker:

- Steve Povolny (Senior Director, Security Research & Competitive Intelligence, Exabeam)

Listen To Live Chat : (Recorded)

Featuring Steve Povolny (Senior Director, Security Research & Competitive Intelligence, Exabeam)

Executive Summary

Security teams face mounting challenges: alert fatigue, complexity of threat analysis, and shortage of skilled analysts.
Task-driven AI agents provide automation and context at every level—helping junior analysts triage alerts, empowering senior investigators with depth, and equipping CISOs with strategic visibility.
This session highlighted:
1. AI-Driven Investigations – inline agents that summarize, classify, and explain cases in seconds.
2. CISO-Level Advisory – agents acting as strategic advisors for posture assessment and coverage gaps.
3. NLP-Powered Orchestration – natural language queries enabling fast searches and visualizations without complex query language.
The promise: reduced mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR), improved analyst productivity, and deeper strategic visibility.

Conversation Highlights

AI-Driven Investigations: From Noise to Narrative

Steve showcased Exabeam’s Investigation Agent, which transforms raw detections into structured case summaries. Instead of manually sifting through 50+ detections, analysts receive a high-level synopsis (including timeline, threat vectors, and classification such as compromised insider).

Key points:

Summaries balance high-level CISO-friendly language with technical context for remediation.
Built-in explainable AI reasoning shows why a case is classified a certain way.
Analysts get prioritized “top 10 most relevant detections” plus recommended next steps (isolate host, reset password, enforce MFA).

This ensures teams can act quickly with confidence instead of drowning in raw alerts.

CISO-Level Advisor: Strategic Guidance at Scale

Beyond investigations, Steve introduced the Advisor Agent within Exabeam’s Outcomes Navigator. Acting like a “virtual consultant,” it continuously analyzes log sources, connectors, and use-case coverage across MITRE ATT&CK.

Highlights:

Identifies strengths (e.g., ransomware, phishing coverage) and gaps (crypto mining, insider threats).
Provides prioritized recommendations: enhance data sources, improve DLP controls, expand cloud monitoring.
Future releases aim to map gaps to specific vendor integrations.

The result: CISOs get a real-time executive view of coverage trends—without expensive manual assessments.

NLP-Powered Orchestration: Natural Language Search & Visualization

Analysts no longer need deep SQL or query-language expertise. Exabeam’s NLP Search Agent converts plain language requests into structured queries and visualizations.

Examples from the demo:

Search for “all malware cases with score above 20 in the last 14 days” and instantly return filtered results.
Auto-generated case names summarize complex chains (e.g., phishing email → malicious domain → credential theft → data exfiltration).
Create visualizations (“bar chart of alerts by user over 14 days”) in seconds, powering threat hunting and executive dashboards.

This democratizes advanced analysis across the SOC—junior analysts can query as easily as senior staff.

Final Thoughts

This session demonstrated that task-driven AI agents are no longer futuristic—they’re practical tools reshaping how investigations, responses, and executive decisions happen in cybersecurity. By combining automation, natural language interfaces, and explainable intelligence, platforms like Exabeam Nova bridge the gap between analyst workloads and CISO strategy.

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