Killing the Playbook with Agentic AI with Allan Alford and Tom Findling

SOAR promised to close the loop in the SOC and fell flat. Agentic AI is finally delivering what a decade of playbooks couldn’t.

In this episode, Ron sits down with Allan Alford, SVP at NTT Global Data Centers, and Tom Findling, co-founder and CEO of Conifers.ai. They cover why static playbooks broke under real-world conditions and how agentic systems are flipping the SOC operating model. They get into hallucination guardrails, human-on-the-loop versus human-in-the-loop, and the QR-code phishing investigation an agent solved on its own without being told how. The conversation closes on trust thresholds, the speed of enterprise adoption, and Allan's blunt warning to any CISO trying to slow this train down… you're already on the tracks.

Impactful Moments
00:00 - Intro
02:30 - Why the lazy sysadmin always wins
05:15 - Why SOAR fell flat
08:00 - Guardrails, hallucinations, and showing the work
13:00 - The SOC AI holy grail
15:30 - The moment you start saying we
17:30 - QR-code phishing the agent solved alone
19:00 - Why playbooks were never going to scale
28:00 - Earning trust at enterprise scale
33:30 - Stand in front of this revolution and lose
35:40 - Risk quantification on business steroids

 

Links
Connect with our guest, Tom Findling, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomfindling/ 

Learn more about Conifers.ai at https://www.conifers.ai 

Connect with our guest, Allan Alford, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allanalford/ 

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