Three years ago, our Security Operations Center was drowning. We were triaging 15,000 alerts daily, chasing false positives while real threats slipped through. Our incident response times averaged 48 hours, and the team was burned out. The turning point came during a ransomware attack that evaded our traditional defenses for six days before lateral movement triggers finally caught it. That breach cost us dearly, but it taught me something invaluable: the old playbook wasn't enough anymore. The cyber threat landscape had evolved beyond human-speed detection, and we needed to fundamentally rethink how we approached threat hunting and response. That's when we began our journey into AI-augmented security operations, and the lessons from that transformation continue to shape how I think about modern cyber defense. Implementing AI in Cyber Defense wasn't the silver bullet I initially hoped for, but it became something better: a force multiplier that amplified our analysts' e...