7AI
The 7AI Boston Tech Week Cyber Summer Kickoff panel.
How Duck Creek Technologies replaced Tier 1 triage with AI agents, and freed its analysts for the work they came to security to do.
Benjamin Dulieu came to the CIO role by an unusual route, starting his career as a Marine. The traits that defined him then carry through to how he leads security now: agility, flexibility, and an instinct for spotting inefficiency and acting on it. The military gave him a career full of moments where he surprised himself with what he could do. AI is the latest.
He started close to home. Benjamin began experimenting with how AI could make his own days more efficient, from helping plan his wife’s birthday to a personal-trainer agent that tracked his progress. AI became the tool he reached for by default. It let him consume information far faster and hand off the manual work he did not care to do anyway.
I remember in the military, these moments where I never knew I could do something, and I did it anyway. I’m feeling that way daily with AI.
Benjamin could see how AI might change the way security operations ran at Duck Creek. The company’s software backs insurance carriers, so it processes enormous data volumes across many disparate systems. Duck Creek works solely in the cloud, which puts cost management at the center of every engineering decision. The cost of the SIEM kept climbing, while the risk-mitigation reward did not keep pace. There was too much manual oversight and limited room to scale.
The strain was not only financial. The SOC analysts were feeling the pressure too. With AI arriving fast, Benjamin decided this was the train to board or risk being left behind. His team needed to move away from a centralized SOC and free its analysts from the benign alerts they were processing every day.
This lets my analysts focus on the bigger, more challenging problems that an agent cannot solve on its own.
Benjamin’s goal was a modern, scalable SOC that could evolve with the business and the threat landscape. He wanted to replace repetitive Tier 1 work with intelligent automation and AI insight for faster detection, clearer visibility, and lower costs. Most of all, he wanted to free his analysts for threat hunting, engineering, and strategy, the work they came to security to do.
In the model he envisioned, agents connect to other agents as points of connection, taking on the low-value alerts like password resets and brute-force attempts, and cutting logging costs along the way.
The hardest obstacle was not technical. Benjamin had overestimated how much everyone else was already using AI, and realized this would be a cultural shift as much as a technological one. So the goal grew to include his people: teaching them how to flex the tool, showing them how powerful it could be, and giving each of them their own moment of clarity.
Time-wasting activities eat away at your creativity.
The technology was never the hard part. Getting an organization to see what it could do was. His approach was deliberately unglamorous: pick one or two basic use cases, put AI in someone’s hands, and let the moment of clarity do the rest.
One Thursday evening, he asked his GRC manager to fully automate a manual process she had been running by hand. By the following Wednesday she had not only built the automation, she was thanking him for showing her what AI made possible.
Start with the basics, show people, and they all become believers.
That belief shaped how he brought the rest of the company along. He invested in training, dozens of hours of it, and pushed his people to put the tools to work rather than admire them from a distance. He kept humans on the loop throughout, reserving them for the emotion, creativity, and strategy that agents cannot replicate, and framing every rollout around the why. When his own employees started arriving with their own ideas, he counted it as the real win.
I don’t feel like anything I said was mind-blowing. It just simplified it. Starting small.
For Benjamin, that is the whole game. The leaders who learn to wield AI will define the next era of security, and the people who learn to wield it will define their own careers.
The leadership job, as he describes it, is not to do all the work. It is to educate, to inspire, and to bring people along, giving a talented team the room and the reason to reach for something they had not tried before.
Your job won’t be replaced by AI. It will be replaced by people who know how to use AI.
The same technology reshaping Benjamin’s SOC is reshaping the other side of the fight. Adversaries are having their own moments of clarity, and the malicious uses of AI are arriving just as fast as the defensive ones. That raised the stakes on a change he already believed in.
The old security model was reactive: a team of incident responders waiting for something to break. Agents make a different approach possible, one that is proactive, real-time, and able to act on what it sees.
That’s what agents bring to the table: proactive, real-time alerting, monitoring, and handling the situation.
Getting there meant a harder decision than most transformations require. Benjamin’s instinct was to replace the old way outright and build something new in its place. The work is uncomfortable. It stresses people and it asks a lot of a team. The return on that discomfort, measured in time and in dollars, is what makes it worth doing.
The conviction traces straight back to where he started. A Marine who learned to spot an inefficiency and act on it is now doing the same thing daily with AI, and pulling his team forward with him. Asked what he would do with a magic wand and 25% of his time back, his answer was simple.
Making memories and breaking systems.
Benjamin Dulieu joined 7AI’s Nate Burke and Lior Div to talk through moving away from a centralized SOC, freeing analysts from around-the-clock toil, and the leadership mindset shift behind rethinking security operations.