Product · 4 MIN READ · JAKE GODGART · JUL 14, 2025 · TAGS: AI & automation
TL;DR
- Expel’s MDR service uses AI and automation to reduce noise and identify credible threats by correlating signals from various security tools.
- Our approach enables analysts to focus on high-priority threats, resulting in faster response times and reduced risk.
- This strategy has led to tangible benefits for our customers, including reduced manual triage efforts and more efficient security operations.
We hear it daily: Too many alerts, not enough good people, tighter budgets, more data. Those who’ve tried to hire their way out of this mess learn it’s a losing battle. The problem is, simply outsourcing that headcount challenge doesn’t fix the underlying issue. When a security provider’s only answer to hitting SLO targets is to hire more analysts, service quality inevitably suffers and their operational costs go up. That inefficiency is eventually passed on to you. It’s a broken model.
And now you have the AI hype machine promising to be the magic wand that fixes everything. We’ve been in this business long enough to know there are no silver bullets. AI is only useful if you give it the right job to do. It isn’t some mystical force that fixes everything.
Eight years ago, we built our MDR service because we saw these exact limitations everywhere else. We knew that our thousandth customer deserved the same top-tier quality as our first customer. And to pull that off, we had to build differently. Simply throwing more people at the problem is a race to the bottom. Modern MDRs require a smarter approach.
So, instead of just building to try and one-up the current competition, we looked inward. The aim wasn’t to replace your existing tools. It was to make your entire security stack—all those excellent, disparate investments you’ve already made—work together as one cohesive unit.
Because here’s the reality: adversaries don’t operate in a silo. They move between your tools, counting on the fact that your endpoint agent can’t see what’s happening in your cloud console, and your firewall logs don’t know about a compromised identity. Those gaps between tools are where threats live, and that’s precisely where most vendors fall short. We, on the other hand, were designed from the ground up to operate in those blind spots.
This whole approach led us to the hard truth of modern security operations: This is a game of noise. The only way to win is to reduce it.
Expel’s AI & automation: Built for real outcomes, not hype
Our strategy is to let the best-in-class tools you’ve invested in do their job of flagging potential threats. Then, we’ll ingest the flood of data and alerts to make sense of it all. We stitch that data together—correlating signals from your EDR, cloud, identity systems, network, or anything else to see your entire environment at once.
That’s the vision behind building our SOC operations platform, Expel Workbench™. It’s a world-class cybersecurity decision support system for analysts to do their work. It’s backed by an AI and automation engine that acts as a workhorse, performing the relentless, high-speed analysis that humans can’t—and shouldn’t have to. Our AI and automation lets our experts find what happens between your point solutions and eliminate the noise so our SOC can focus on credible, cross-domain threats and address them before they can do harm.
We built our entire service around three common-sense principles:
- Speed and accuracy matter equally. Sacrificing one for the other is pointless. You have to do both well.
- Technology should serve people, not replace them. The goal of our tech is to handle the grunt work and tee up the critical decisions that require an experienced human eye.
- Trust is earned. You don’t get that with a “black box.” Our analysts (and customers) are always in the loop. It’s not a weakness; you see what we see and it’s a requirement for doing the job right.
This disciplined approach is what we think is the right way to use AI and automation for security. While others focus on triage (far right of the alert management lifecycle), we’ve decided to focus on both enrichment (far left) to augment human intelligence and decision support, as well as triage (far right) to reduce the noise. Addressing both sides of this continuum allows our experts to deliver actionable outcomes for customers. We’d rather innovate this way instead of playing AI buzzword bingo.
Less chaos, more security
So what does this approach—connecting your tools, finding threats in the gaps, and focusing on solving the noise issue—actually mean for you? It’s about AI and automation helping find the needle in the haystack by connecting the dots, not just burning the haystack with AI. This means:
- Actually reducing risk by killing the noise. Talk is cheap. We turned two million alerts for Venable into just 114 findings someone had to investigate. For a Fortune 50 company, we cut 15 billion events (over five weeks) down to 35 investigations. That’s noise reduction in practice.
- Moving fast where it counts. Because we’re not chasing ghosts, we can respond to real, high-priority alerts in 15 minutes and resolve critical incidents in 17 minutes, start to finish. That’s quicker than the time it takes to order a pizza and have it delivered. As just one example, Dayton Children’s Hospital saw their response time drop from hours to minutes after working with us.
- Making your team more efficient. Affirm cut their manual triage effort in half. A leisure products company gets 120 hours per week back. This isn’t about magical gains; it’s about eliminating wasted time.
- Getting more value from your existing tools. We don’t ask you to rip and replace. Our job is to make the point solutions you already invested in perform better by providing the connective tissue between them. While some MDRs opt for dumping all the logs into a SIEM or XDR solution to figure out what happened, our approach allows us to get the same end result (and even leverage those SIEM and XDR tools) in a better, faster way without creating noise for your team.
The bottom line
The bottom line is this: what we do is practical and proven. We’re not distracted by industry hype or the latest AI trend. We’re focused on solving the real, underlying problem in security operations by automatically filtering out the noise and stitching together high-fidelity signals so we can amplify our human experts to perform at their absolute best. Whether it’s basic automation or AI, that’s been part of our ethos since day one.
This means you get faster responses, less risk, and a transparent partner that allows your team to do the job they were actually hired for.
We just got the MDR strategy right from the start.
No B.S. and to the point. That’s the Expel way.
