AI, Autonomy & Resilience: Key Insights from Darktrace Live (NL)

I first encountered Darktrace pre-pandemic while on the Rignet board, a company that served critical energy infrastructure. Darktrace’s AI-driven behavioral analysis helped detect zero-day threats — including from state-sponsored actors and helped Rignet earn trust with major clients.

Fast forward: At Darktrace Live, it was clear the platform has matured — and so has the conversation around AI in cyber defense. A few takeaways relevant to critical infrastructure leaders:

• Security vs. Networking Silos
  SOC teams dominated the audience — unlike SASE events, where network engineers prevail. The convergence of NetOps and SecOps remains more aspirational than real in many enterprises. Tools alone will not solve the defense in depth security needs, enterprises need to accelerate organizational change as well.
• Autonomous Response Gains Ground
  Darktrace stated that 50% of its customers now trust AI to remediate autonomously. That level of operational confidence is rare in network operations.
•  AI Triage as a Standard
  Whether network or security operations, AI is now essential for cutting through alert noise and surfacing actionable insight —as threats and events increase in scale and speed.
• Data Sovereignty
  Unlike the SASE providers, Darktrace comes down squarely on side of data sovereignty. It keeps analysis and data lakes under enterprise control — and does not centrally host. There are pros and cons to both approaches, and some SASE providers are moving to giving the enterprise a choice.
  
  For CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs in critical infrastructure: Tools are beginning to span the IT, Network and Security domains and AI isn’t just augmenting analysis — it’s beginning to act independently. The real question is how soon we can align organizations, trust, process, and policy to keep pace. Careful thought needs to be given on how to select vendors coming from different domains during this period of consolidation and eventual simplification.