CISO’s DIY AI Agent Project Excelling at Burning Money

In an inspiring display of initiative and impending burnout, a CISO announced the launch of an internal project to build custom AI agents for security automation — a move that has successfully automated the process of converting budget into AWS invoices.

Dubbed Project SmartSentinelAI++, the initiative began with high hopes, a whiteboard, and a staff engineer named Greg who "read a few Hugging Face tutorials and seemed really passionate." Six months and $72,000 in compute costs later, the project's primary achievement is burning through money faster than the compliance violations it was meant to detect.

Initial prototypes showed promise, especially the one that hallucinated Jira tickets for threats that didn't exist, reducing incident response volume by 37%. But enthusiasm waned once leadership realized the agents cost $12,000/month to run, quadruple the price of the vendor solution they were built to replace, and couldn't be fine-tuned without summoning Greg from paternity leave.

"It's powerful," said the CISO, while staring blankly at a metrics dashboard labeled 'THREAT SENTIMENT' and an AWS bill that triggered fraud alerts. "It just… needs context, scalability, another $50,000, an MLOps team, and a succession plan in case Greg joins OpenAI."

The project's ROI analysis, hastily prepared for the CFO, revealed that for the cost of Greg's custom solution, the company could have purchased the enterprise vendor product, hired two additional analysts, and still had enough budget left over for the team offsite that was cancelled to fund month three of GPU training.

Sources say Greg recently began referring to the agents as "my children" and committed a 900-line YAML file titled DO_NOT_TOUCH.yaml. When asked about total project costs, he replied, "I don't think about it in dollar terms; I think about it in learning opportunities."

The CISO has since reallocated the remaining budget to an off-the-shelf solution from a vendor with a worse UI, better liability clauses, and a monthly cost low enough that the CFO stopped asking pointed questions about "innovation theater."