Is Your New AI-Based SOC Basically Elevator Music? And If It Is, What If You Change The Channel?

Our friend Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is back at it. He might not forgive Argentina, um, not winning the 2026 FIFA Men's WC Final, but he is here for us. His latest Substack post poses an interesting question: Is AI Reducing Human Creativity to the Intellectual Equivalent of Elevator Music?

In short his answer is Yes. (Along the way, Tomas discusses the history of Muzak, which apparently was founded in the 1930s in the service of capitalism: Music, executives discovered, could influence mood, reduce perceived waiting times, increase productivity, and even encourage people to spend more money. Art became environmental engineering. Leveraging the communication technologies of the time, from leased telephone lines to centrally distributed recordings and later inexpensive synthesizers and digital production, Muzak industrialized pleasantness. The objective was never to compose the next Gershwin concerto. It was to create a soundtrack that nobody would notice precisely because it never demanded attention. 

"Industrialized pleasantness." "Reduce perceived waiting times." "[The purposes was] to create a soundtrack that nobody would notice precisely because it never demanded attention."

The point of Muzac is to create a calming, soothing, maybe even upbeat environment where it seems that everything is going swimmingly so buy the product.

Tomas boils down his argument to this: 

The organizational theorist James March famously distinguished between exploration and exploitation in learning organizations. Exploitation means becoming increasingly efficient at what already works. Exploration means venturing into uncertain territory where most experiments fail but the occasional success transforms everything that follows. Organizations naturally drift toward exploitation because it feels safer and more measurable than exploration. AI, magnificent though it is, may represent the ultimate exploitation machine. It synthesizes the accumulated wisdom of the past with extraordinary efficiency. That is immensely valuable for many tasks. It is considerably less obvious that it helps us discover genuinely new ideas. March’s classic paper remains one of the clearest explanations of why optimizing yesterday’s solutions rarely produces tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

Your AI-based system is supposed to make your job easier by doing your old job. What it does not answer for you is the question that, yes really, Bhushan Sethi asked: What is now "your job"? Do you know? How about your leadership? Because let me break it to you, executives are not going to pay for you and for an AI-based SOC.

We at Pythia Cyber propose that "your job" in the AI-based cybersecurity environment is mastering the AI. You have no real alternative. "Mastering AI" isn't about prompt engineering or model selection. It's about understanding how your team actually uses the tool -- the incentives, the training, the culture -- and making sure that use pattern keeps humans in the exploratory work that AI can't do. 

Ask us how you can master the AI tune, because it's time to go from automation to activation.

(image credit: presumably Muzak Holdings LLC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)