The evolution of AI at Elastic Security — three years from a chat sidekick to agents that investigate, reason, and act.
James Spiteri · Elastic Security
Quick show of hands
Where is your SOC on this curve?
presenter: click a card per raised hand · shift-click to undo
Three years · three paradigms
Chat → Purpose-built → Agentic
💬
2023 · Ask
ChatGPT moment. Natural language becomes the interface — AI Assistant answers questions, explains alerts, writes queries. Human does everything else.
GPT-4 · 32K tokens
⚙️
2024 · Apply
LLMs aimed at specific painful jobs: Attack Discovery triages alerts in bulk; Automatic Import, Migration & Troubleshooting kill weeks of toil. Output lands in real UIs, not chat.
Claude 3 era · LangGraph
🤖
2025–26 · Act
Agents with tools, reasoning you can read, workflows, MCP & A2A. From answering questions to running investigations end-to-end — with the analyst in control.
Agent Builder · 9.3 → 9.4
The journey · click any milestone
2023 → today, in seven moves
June 2023
The chat era begins
ChatGPT had just taken the world by storm — natural language democratized the technology. We shipped the Elastic AI Assistant to find out what value it could actually deliver in a SOC.
Elastic AI Assistant · October 2023 · connector: "James Azure 32K"
The actual 2023 UI — my own connector, 32K tokens and all. Promising, but a long way from carrying real SOC weight.
Meanwhile, the models…
The floor kept rising under us
4K
GPT-3.5
2022
32K
GPT-4
2023 · Assistant launch
200K
Claude 3
2024 · Attack Discovery
tools
Function calling matures
2024–25
reasoning
Extended thinking + MCP
2025
agentic
Frontier models, late 2025
→ dramatic step change
Context windows → tool use → readable reasoning: each capability unlocked the next product era.
Attack Discovery · triage at machine speed
Bulk alert triage → discoveries with attack chains, entities, and MITRE ATT&CK mapping.
May 2024 · patent pending
Attack Discovery: beyond chat
LLM-powered triage over alerts in bulk, with findings in a dedicated interface — not a conversation. Claude 3 had just landed, and the results told us we could keep pushing.
🧩 The insight
Chat is an interface, not the product. Put the model inside the workflow and give the output a real home in the UI.
📉 The payoff
Alert fatigue is a volume problem. Machines read 100 alerts the way analysts read one — connecting them into attack chains automatically.
Lesson № 1 · learned the hard way
No evals, no trust
Attack Discovery's results made one thing obvious: quality drifts. New models, new prompts, new data shapes — without evaluations, you're shipping vibes.
LangSmith eval harnessCurated attack-scenario datasetsRegression-gated prompt changesModel swap in hours, not weeks
prompt × accuracy — same task, wildly different outcomes
Real eval heatmap: adjacent prompt variants swinging from ~95% to ~25% accuracy.
2024 → 2025 · purpose-built AI
The "Automatic" family — LLMs aimed at toil
📥
Automatic Import
Point it at any log source; it builds the custom integration and pipeline. Weeks of onboarding → minutes.
🔁
Automatic Migration
Translates rules & dashboards from your legacy SIEM into Elastic equivalents — the #1 migration blocker, automated.
🩺
Automatic Troubleshooting
Diagnoses Elastic Defend deployment issues automatically instead of hours of doc-spelunking.
🕸️ Under the hood: agents before they were cool
Assistant re-architected on LangChain LangGraph — first agent graph with knowledge sources, sub-agents for ES|QL query generation. Attack Discovery pivoted to agents too.
Automatic Migration · translated rules
Not just us saying it
The industry noticed
🏆
AWS Partner Awards 2024
Global Generative AI Infrastructure & Data Partner of the Year — announced at re:Invent 2024. Among the first 15 partners awarded the AWS GenAI Competency.
re:Invent 2024
🕸️
LangChain: Top LangGraph Agents
Named #2 of the "Top 5 LangGraph Agents in Production 2024" — recognized as one of the first companies anywhere to ship a production AI agent.
LangGraph · LangSmith
🤝
AWS strategic collaboration
Five-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS (2025) — accelerating agentic AI, MCP, and agent-to-agent interoperability. 2025 GenAI Partner award global finalist.
Bedrock · MCP · A2A
2025 · MCP lands, and the conversation flips
What 500+ customer conversations taught us
“We don't really know how we would use generative AI in our SOC…”2023–24 · almost every conversation
→
“We want this end-to-end agentic flow to improve our process — how do we do it with Elastic?”2025 · the new default question
0
feedback sessions & interactions in ~18 months
3
asks heard everywhere: control · customization · insight
Deterministic YAML workflows become tools agents can call — LLM judgment where you want it, rules-based certainty where you need it. GA in Serverless & 9.3.
January 2026 · Elastic 9.3
Agentic, everywhere it counts
🔍 Agentic investigations
Agents that pull context, run queries, and build the picture across your data — reasoning shown, analyst in charge.
🧠 AI summaries in the flow
Entity risk explained in plain language — why this host, why this score, what to do next — right in Entity Analytics.
🛠️ Your agents, your rules
Agent Builder + Workflows + MCP/A2A across the platform: compose the SOC automation you actually want.
Elastic 9.3 · AI entity summary & risk
9.3: AI-generated entity summaries with recommended actions, inside the analyst workflow.
The full loop: Attack Discovery finds it → workflow opens a case → agent investigates → findings + reasoning land in Slack.
Today · Elastic 9.4
The agentic SOC, shipping
⚡ Workflows GA
Native automation in Elastic Security — triage, enrichment, response, case management. No standalone SOAR required.
🧰 Skills for the Elastic AI Agent
Five SOC skills: alert triage, detection rule authoring, entity investigation, threat hunting, anomaly analysis — chained in one investigation. Agent Builder GA in Security.
🧬 Entity Analytics, rebuilt for agents
Precision Entity Identification, Entity Resolution, Dynamic Watchlists, hunting leads — one authoritative record per person, so agents reason over accurate context.
9.5 is around the corner — more skills incoming: detection emulation, binary analysis, alert dedup.
If you remember five things
What it takes to go from assistant to trusted agent
Keep joined forces with Elastic — automation for agents, agents for automation.
