Skip to content
Cyber Unboxed
Practical Experiments

Experiment: AI vs Human Alert Triage

How to fairly compare AI triage suggestions with a human analyst's, and what's worth measuring beyond who's right most often.

2 min readIntermediate Sep 14, 2026

Explain Like I'm Not a Hacker

A practice exam, essentially: the same questions go to the assistant and to a person, both marked against the same answer key.

The 30-second explanation

Take a batch of old alerts where you know the real outcome. Have the assistant triage them, hide the answers, then compare its suggestions with what actually happened.

How it works

  1. 1

    1. Build the set

    Closed alerts with known outcomes, redacted.

  2. 2

    2. Run

    Same prompt and output format for each.

  3. 3

    3. Compare

    Suggestions against known outcomes.

  4. 4

    4. Review

    Study misses and weak reasoning first.

Choose a small set of closed alerts with known outcomes, including harmless ones and real incidents, then strip out anything sensitive. Give each one to the assistant using the same structured prompt. Record its suggested priority and reasoning, and set that beside the analyst's final verdict. Pay the most attention to real incidents the assistant downgraded, since those are the misses that actually cost something. Also note whether its reasoning held up even on the alerts where the verdict happened to be right. Nothing here is a finished result. It's a way to find out, on your own alert set, exactly how much you can lean on the assistant's judgement.

Real-world example

You find that the assistant handles routine sign-in alerts sensibly but rates a real, unusual case as low priority because the pattern looked familiar. That single miss teaches you to keep human review on that alert type.

How to spot it

  • Only measuring accuracy

    Ignoring which errors were the costly kind.

  • Test set too easy

    Mostly obvious alerts.

  • Leaked answers

    The outcome visible in the alert text.

  • Small, unrepresentative samples

    Conclusions drawn from a handful of cases.

What to do

  1. 1Include hard and real incidents in the set, not only routine alerts.
  2. 2Track missed real threats separately from false alarms.
  3. 3Re-run the test when the model, prompt or alert types change.

Stay curious. Stay safer.

This is one piece of a bigger picture. Explore more real-world examples, concepts and tips to build your cybersecurity awareness.

Explore More

Keep reading