AI in the SOC: Why Explainability is the New Security Control

AI is increasingly handling SOC workloads, but black-box models create friction when analysts can't understand how alerts were generated. Explainability—showing the underlying events, correlations, enrichment data, and reasoning behind AI decisions—is argued to be a critical security control. Transparent AI reduces investigation time, lowers false positive rates, supports audit trails, and enables human-AI collaboration where analysts provide context and judgment while AI handles volume and pattern recognition. Regulatory and executive pressure is also driving demand for traceable, defensible AI-driven security decisions.