Augmented, Not Replaced – Humans Outpace AI in Simbian’s SOC Hackathon Champions
Simbian’s industry-first AI SOC Hackathon Championship has concluded, bringing with it an exciting glimpse into the future of cybersecurity operations. The competition showcased not just artificial intelligence flexing its capability in handling security alerts, but how human expertise remains essential in high-pressure, real-world defense scenarios, and that AI is here to augment, NOT replace humans. This wasn’t a Steve Jobs one-word big font marketing moment. This was pure. This was a Steve Wozniak moment (aka The Woz) as it was about builders, about doers, about people who love to explore, innovate and push the envelope. This hackathon was the real deal and saw the “Woz Spirit” in every participant.
The format was simple in theory, formidable in execution, and by no means another fluffy AI marketing event. This was the real deal! A pool of over one hundred participants from around the world entered a 24-hour, later extended to 36-hour, live challenge. They collaborated with Simbian’s AI SOC Agents to detect and respond to simulated attacks across platforms like Splunk, CrowdStrike, Microsoft and SentinelOne. Each analyst faced 100 alerts, 90 of them false positives, crafted to emulate the high-noise, high-stakes environment of a modern SOC.
And the Winners of the Inaugural Simbian SOC AI Hackathon Are (Drumroll Please)
After careful review by Simbian’s security team and validation through AI metrics, three finalists emerged, and they are:
Gold Medal: Team Freddy-Beach
This team earned top honors with a score of 86 out of 100. Their success stemmed from an expert blend of AI-guided workflows and human-driven logic. Judges praised their use of Simbian’s Context Lake feature, as well as their detailed standard operating procedures, which elevated their investigation beyond typical analyst workflows.
Silver Medal: Team NinJa
The runners-up demonstrated exceptional tactical acumen and creative problem-solving. They identified nuanced attack paths using advanced co-pilot tools and guided AI modules efficiently under token constraints.
Bronze Medal: Ahmad Rifai
Operating solo, Rifai delivered an impressive performance that reflected his years of experience in SOC environments. Rifai called Simbian “the next generation of SOAR,” crediting the platform’s automation and visual interface for helping him focus on high-level reasoning.
The Experiment in Collaboration
While most security platforms still market automation as an end goal, Simbian’s experiment reinforced that AI works best as a collaborator, not a replacement. As participant Nick Phelan, formerly of IBM Security, put it, “The AI traced data patterns I might have missed, but it was my job to interpret what those patterns meant for our defense strategy.”
Simbian’s AI SOC Agent baseline score was 59. When pushed into “extra effort” mode, it scored 72, a result only five human participants exceeded. But the value wasn’t in the leaderboard alone. It was in the process and partnership of AI and humans. Human-AI teams completed investigations 2.3 times faster, with 42% better accuracy in narrative reconstruction. Junior analysts achieved near-senior-level impact through AI-guided steps, verdict-based triage and visual kill-chain mapping.
“It let me focus on protecting assets and guiding leadership, rather than querying log data for hours,” said Yutoku Takahisa, another participant.
“What we saw was that people brought their own unique ways of interacting with the AI,” said Igor Kozlov, Simbian’s senior machine learning engineer and one of the key architects of the platform. “Some approached it like a conversation. Others took a more tactical, hypothesis-driven path. But all of them pushed the platform in directions we hadn’t expected.”
Live-Fire Infrastructure
If the hackathon simulated a cyberattack, it inadvertently created a real-world infrastructure test. Roughly six hours in, storage I/O requests jumped 18x, latency ballooned, and AWS-hosted systems went down. “We had prepared for GPU demand. What we didn’t anticipate was how storage capacity would scale when 100+ analysts started digging deep all at once,” said Ambuj Kumar, Simbian CEO and co-founder.
Simbian’s team quickly recovered by extending the event to 36 hours. The chaos forced improvements. Post-hackathon benchmarking showed a 91% reduction in query contention and a 3.9x improvement in resource utilization. “Watching the Simbian team recover in real-time was like watching a live incident response,” said Phelan.
Lessons From the Edge
Perhaps the most revealing part of the competition wasn’t who won, but how they worked. Some participants relied heavily on structured reasoning. Others used a “shotgun” approach, querying everything in sight. In one surprising case, that tactic surfaced an unanticipated signal chain that even the AI developers hadn’t foreseen.
“We saw participants who weren’t sure where to start, but they kept asking the AI to go deeper,” reflected Igor Kozlov. “And it worked. Simbian AI connected dots across systems and timelines in ways we hadn’t predicted. It was humbling, honestly.”
Kumar echoed this sentiment, “That’s the value of real-world experimentation and collaboration. You don’t just test the known technology and use cases, you discover new limitations, possibilities and meaningful applications for any enterprise.”
The AI SOC Agent wasn’t just following a script. It was engaging with real systems, and participants could guide, refine, or even override its actions. This approach helped participants build trust in the platform’s decision-making, while also encouraging strategic thinking over rote execution.
In terms of product development, the event highlighted a key area: The need for better user interface clarity and agentic flow debugging. Future versions of Simbian’s platform will incorporate these insights to enhance transparency in how agents process and act upon human input.
Looking Ahead
As Simbian eyes future championships, the lessons from this event are already being folded into their roadmap. More than just a showcase, this hackathon served as a proving ground for both AI capabilities and the enduring value of human intuition. “This is what we need in cybersecurity,” said Rifai. “Not another dashboard, but something that helps us think, collaborate and push innovation.”
“Ten years from now, I believe we will look back on this moment the way we looked at early deep learning events as the start of something truly transformative,” concluded Kumar. “This was a victory for not only the participants but for everyone in our industry and the global community!”
In a world chasing speed and scale, the real victory lies in thoughtful human-machine collaboration and Simbian laying the framework for how the entire industry should approach AI innovation. The Woz way!
