Ananthapavan predicts that this shift in security operations would be fundamental across the industry and would reduce the reliance on level 1 and 2 SOC analysts.

Instead, agentic AI capabilities would take on those roles, while human security teams could shift focus to more advanced, high-level work.

“That’s going to take time as we start to deploy our agentic capabilities, build confidence in those models, and get to a point where we can rely on [their] decision making,” Ananthapavan said.

“We’re at the very early stage of our journey, and for us, we will still very much have humans in the loop as we build confidence ... in our agentic models.

“We will then look at the right time to pull humans out of the loop and enable our staff to focus on high-value [security] work.”

Ananthapavan discussed the shift at Google’s Cloud Summit in Sydney, with Bendigo Bank’s agentic SOC supported by a Google Cloud technology stack, which will allow it to consolidate multiple existing tools and systems into one.

Already, the bank has begun decommissioning existing systems, with the savings going towards AI and agentic security development.

“[Removing old systems has] certainly given us a greater flexibility and financial freedom to be able to do that,” he said.

Agentic SOC capabilities are reportedly set to improve security posture and incident-response decision times.

“Once we get to a point where we’ve got those real-time insights and we’re able to drive decision making in terms of actions that the agents can drive in the context of our environment, we will have an opportunity to start to use those agents to strengthen our defences,” he said.

“It could be something as simple as our web application firewalls that protect our customer-facing services, [where] we can use that information, insights and those agents to start to drive real-time uplift of our control environment.

“So, what we’re starting with now – and we’re still very early on – will empower our security operations team, but I see it empowering our security teams more broadly.”

Bendigo Bank under fire as AI threatens jobs

The announcement from Bendigo Bank comes as it has conceded that new partnerships will impact staff.

In a statement in April, closely following the partnership announcement, the Finance Sector Union (FSU) said it condemned the partnership between the bank and Infosys and Genpact, “which represents a dramatic and dangerous escalation in the fight to protect Australian jobs from being wiped out by AI,” the FSU wrote.

The FSU said the number of staff could be in the hundreds, maybe even the 1,000s.

FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano said the decision should make Australians angry, as they would be in the firing line.

“The race to the bottom has well and truly started in Australia when it comes to AI adoption and offshoring, and Australians should be outraged by the failures of both business and government,” she said.

“We are now seeing in real time the disastrous consequences of a complete lack of AI regulation, and Australian workers are paying the ultimate price.

“The idea of Bendigo Bank being a community bank is now dead. It has completely abandoned any pretence of being Australia’s most trusted bank.

“The fact that Bendigo Bank cannot say how many jobs will be impacted inspires zero confidence that management understands the full ramifications of what they are doing.”

Angrisano demanded that Bendigo Bank CEO Richard Fennell reverse the decision, adding that the federal government’s AI regulation was lacklustre.