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Mike Baker on stage at Gartner, 2026.
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If you're not using AI now, and it's not in your roadmap, you are already behind.
Mike Baker
CISO · DXC Technology
How DXC Technology put agentic AI to work across a global SOC processing 4.5 million threats a day, then turned the same capability outward to customers worldwide.
“CISOs have a lifelong learning obligation.” It is one of Mike Baker's core beliefs, and it shapes how he leads security at DXC Technology.
Mike has spent more than two decades in cybersecurity, moving from consulting into security leadership and into the CISO seat. He took his first CISO role in 2015, and every wave of technology since, from web to mobile to cloud, has forced him to reinvent how he defends the business. Leading in the era of AI is, he says, his most exciting evolution yet.
Keeping up with adversaries is nothing new. What has changed is the pace. A lot of CISOs are focused on protecting the business from AI. The opportunity Mike is chasing is the opposite: using AI to make the DXC team faster, sharper defenders.
If you're not using AI now, and it's not in your roadmap, you are already behind.
The pace is what is different. A new class of technology used to give security leaders years to absorb. AI does not. Mike's view is blunt: the old annual planning cycle no longer works, and the window to put something new into production is now measured in months, not years. A CISO cannot be the person who says no. The job is to move with the business and bring the best of what is emerging into the team's defenses before the attacker does.
He has the track record to do it. Mike is one of CISOs Connect's 2025 Top 100 CISOs, a CYNEC Most Trusted CISO, an NVTC Cyber Executive of the Year finalist, and a two-time ORBIE nominee and winner of the 2025 Global ORBIE in the Washington, DC program. Today he secures one of the world's largest IT services companies, with more than 130,000 employees.
Adversaries are already using AI, so defenders have to be rapidly prototyping, putting AI to work, and choosing the right partners. Cutting-edge partners. That is where 7AI entered the picture.
DXC, number 315 on the Fortune 500, serves hundreds of customers worldwide through 25 delivery centers that process 4.5 million security threats a day. To handle an external services organization at that scale, plus its own internal footprint, the team needed a partner that could give analysts their time back and reclaim real productivity.
They were skeptical that any AI could handle their volume and complexity, and they set a high bar for the number and scope of investigations, the time savings, and the speed of deployment. So Mike asked 7AI to do one thing: show him the value. Prove this was the right investment. 7AI delivered.
It was one of the first AI technologies I have seen where I could see the full triad of value: fast, efficient, and autonomous.
7AI delivered dramatic time savings where it mattered most, cutting the hours analysts spent reviewing tickets across one of the most demanding security environments in the world. The platform proved it could run DXC's worldwide operations without compromise, at the scale of 25 delivery centers and 4.5 million daily threats, and it went from proof of concept to worldwide production in eight weeks. Most important of all, 7AI showed DXC how to separate the human work from the machine work.
No one takes a SOC analyst job to look at the same alerts every day. When AI takes the repetitive work, people get the chance to upskill and grow. With 7AI, Mike's team has moved up the value chain. Analysts who were buried in the queue are becoming threat hunters, leaders of threat-hunting teams, and incident-response leads.
Right off the bat, we've seen an 80% reduction in Tier 1 analyst time. As those tickets progressed through the funnel, we've seen easily a 95-99% reduction in the tickets that human beings have to look at. Incredible outcome.
Measured across one of the world's most demanding security environments. Not a pilot. Worldwide production.
That internal success became the proof point for something bigger. In August 2025, DXC and 7AI announced a strategic partnership to launch DXC Agentic SOC, a managed service that runs autonomous AI agents across DXC's end-to-end security operations, from alert ingestion through investigation to remediation, and makes that capability available to DXC customers worldwide.
For Mike, being customer zero was the whole point. DXC ran the model against its own immense telemetry first, then turned the same capability outward to the customers who need it. The agentic shift, he notes, is easiest to see in the SOC, where it changes the nature of the work itself. DXC will not claim it is perfect, because they are operating on the leading edge, but the upside is a service that runs faster, more consistently, and more efficiently, putting customers in a position to meet threats where they are.
Bringing the best possible cyber defense to bear at scale, for amazing customers around the world. That is the golden opportunity.
For Mike, the 7AI deployment is more than a successful rollout. It is proof of the thesis he has built his career on. Every shift, from web to mobile to cloud, has forced him to reinvent how he works, and the AI era is no different except in its pace.
The CISOs who treat AI as something to defend against, rather than a capability to wield, will find themselves on the wrong side of a clock that no longer gives anyone three or four years to catch up. By moving early, proving the model on DXC's own operations before extending it to customers worldwide, Mike has positioned his team not just to keep up with adversaries already using AI, but to get out in front of them.
We believe this is the world's largest, most successful AI SOC deployment.
The toil that once defined Tier 1 is giving way to higher-order work, and the analysts once buried in the alert queue are becoming the threat hunters and incident-response leads of a sharper, faster SOC. That is what a lifelong learning obligation looks like in practice. Not adopting AI for its own sake, but using it to build better defenders.
Mike Baker joined 7AI's Lior Div and Nate Burke to tell the full story behind the deployment: his opportunity bias, why the old planning cycle is dead, and how AI is changing the nature of security work.