Survey: Widespread Adoption of AI Hasn’t Yet Reduced Cybersecurity Burnout
Survey: Widespread Adoption of AI Hasn’t Yet Reduced Cybersecurity Burnout
Publish Date: 2026-02-11 15:42:00
Source Domain: securityboulevard.com
A global survey of 1,813 IT and cybersecurity professionals finds that despite the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, cybersecurity teams still spend on average 44% of their time on manual or repetitive work.
Conducted by Sapio Research on behalf of Tines, a provider of an automation platform, the survey also notes that as the amount of work continues to increase, so too does the level of burnout. A full 81% said security workloads increased in 2025, with more than three quarters (76%) experiencing burnout and 39% attributing that burnout specifically to heavy workloads.
In comparison, just over a quarter attributed burnout to the stresses of incident response, while 26% cited repetitive tasks. A total of 60% also noted they are spending at least 40% of their time on repetitive tasks that could be automated, the survey finds
The main obstacles to automation are security or compliance concerns (35%), budget or resource constraints (32%), integration gaps between tools (31%), legacy or outdated systems (30%) and insufficient skills or training (29%). Additionally, the top challenges with existing tools are high maintenance costs (42%), limited automation (34%), overlapping functionality (33%) and lack of integration (31%).
Conversely, the top benefits of automation are higher productivity (48%), faster response times (41%), better data accuracy (40%), stronger compliance (34%), quicker decision-making (33%), better team visibility (33%) and smoother collaboration (33%).
While the full impact of AI and automation has not yet been realized, nearly all respondents (99%) said security operations centers have embedded AI to some degree in their workflows. Areas where AI is proving most effective are threat intelligence and detection (61%), identity and access monitoring (56%), compliance and policy writing (56%), phishing or email analysis (55%), ticket triage and workflow automation (53%), reporting and communication…
