And we’re putting our money — and our hiring — where our conviction is.

The story most people are hearing goes something like this: automation is coming for your job, machines are getting smarter and humans are becoming optional. It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also almost entirely wrong.

The anxiety is real and understandable. Teachers watch students use AI to shortcut their thinking. Workers watch legacy processes get automated overnight. Executives watch budgets get rewritten by tools that did not exist two years ago. When change moves fast and the benefits stay abstract, fear fills the vacuum. And right now, fear is driving most of the public conversation about artificial intelligence.

That’s a problem because anxiety isn’t analysis, innovation is evolution and never an end state. AI is empowering evolution but the fear and scare tactics are controlling the narrative versus the benefits it provides.

Here’s what’s actually happening, at least in cybersecurity, where we operate every day.

A modern SOC can generate thousands of alerts in a single day. Tier 1 analysts spend most of that day triaging noise. Chasing false positives. Validating signals that lead nowhere. By the time a genuinely sophisticated threat surfaces, those analysts are working through fatigue. That’s not a human failure. It’s a structural problem and no amount of hiring solves it.

TENEX handles it differently. AI processes the volume at machine speed without fatigue without recency bias from yesterday’s incident. That frees human analysts to do what only they can: think, investigate and apply the kind of contextual adversarial judgment no model has and every serious threat demands.

TENEX built an AI-native, human-led managed detection and response. AI isn’t a layer we added – it’s the foundation of everything we’ve built.

Where others saw a threat landscape growing faster than human teams could handle, TENEX saw a clear path: build AI that thinks like an elite analyst and pair it with analysts who push it further. AI-native and led by exceptional humans. Because one without the other isn’t enough.

The result is something the market hasn’t seen before. An MDR that handles 100% of alerts and triages 95%+ autonomously with sub-minute response times. But speed was never the ultimate goal. It was to give analysts their time back. To reduce the noise and the fatigue that burns good people out. To free the humans who chose this profession because they wanted to protect people to actually do that. And in doing so take a real meaningful swing at reducing cybercrime itself.

This is the real story of AI and human work. Not displacement. It’s Elevation.

The Smartest AI Companies Hire the Smartest Humans On Purpose

Here’s a question worth sitting with: if AI is so capable, why would an AI-native company go out of its way to hire the most incredible, experienced, deeply skilled humans in the market?

“Because AI without human intelligence isn’t security, it’s just automation.”

Being AI-native doesn’t mean humans matter less. It means you understand the relationship between human and machine intelligence deeply enough to know where each one is irreplaceable. When you’ve built AI from the ground up, you know precisely where it breaks down and you hire exceptional people to own exactly those moments.

In MDR, that means your AI handles the volume, the speed, the pattern recognition across millions of signals. But it’s your elite analysts, your threat hunters, your incident responders, the humans who bring adversarial thinking, organisational context, creative intuition and accountability. These are not skills you can train into a model. 

There’s also a second layer to this: great humans make your AI better. At an AI-native company, your analysts are not just responding to threats, they are informing the models, identifying where AI judgment is drifting and continuously sharpening the system’s ability to learn and react. The feedback loop between your best people and your AI is a competitive advantage that a company bolting AI onto a legacy platform can never replicate.

Being AI-native did not lower the bar for the humans we hire; it raised it, meaning the bar went up, not away.

Why We’re Investing in People Right Now, 

A Message From Our CEO

Eric Foster, CEO, TENEX:

“I’ve been in cybersecurity for over 30 years, as a CISO, as a builder, as someone who has watched this threat landscape evolve into something most people still underestimate. The adversaries are using the same AI we are and they never stop. That’s not a reason to pull back on people. That’s exactly why we’re doubling down on them.

Here’s what most people get wrong: the better your AI gets, the more you need exceptional humans to push it, challenge it and make it sharper. Our models don’t get smarter in a vacuum. They get smarter because we have the right analysts, the right leaders and the right thinkers analyzing them every single day. 

The hires we’re announcing today are not despite the AI era. They’re because of it and I consider building this team a national and moral imperative.

At TENEX, we are  not here to build another security tool. We are  here to redefine how this fight gets fought and it takes the best humans and the best AI working together to win it.”

— Eric Foster, CEO, TENEX

These hires are more than symbolic; they represent a clear commitment to TENEX’s foundation and future direction. The people joining us possess the critical ability to analyze the model, recognize its flaws and ultimately use their judgment to stand by the outcome in front of a client, rather than simply relying on a dashboard. This expertise is precisely what this pivotal moment requires of our company.

Building Where It Matters: Our Growing Footprint

TENEX is expanding its geographic footprint alongside its team growth. We currently operate out of San Jose, Kansas City (Overland Park), and Sarasota. Plans are in progress to establish new offices in EMEA, Phoenix, and the Northeast, strategically targeting key markets and talent pools crucial for achieving the next stage of our mission.

Every new city is a commitment to the talent there, to the clients nearby and to the broader goal of building a company that can go the distance in the fight against cybercrime. Our funding is going where our conviction is: into people, places and the platform that ties them together.

Anything Powerful in Life Rewards the People Who Lean Into It

Think about any major shift in human capability – the printing press, electricity and the internet. In every case, the people who ran toward it rather than away from it didn’t lose their relevance. They gained leverage. They could do more, think bigger and operate at a level that simply wasn’t available to those who waited on the sideline.

AI is that moment right now.

The athletes who embraced film study got sharper. The businesses that embraced the internet didn’t just adapt – they led. The analysts, the leaders and the teams who choose to understand AI, work with it and push it further aren’t threatened by it. They’re multiplied by it.

In cybersecurity, the analyst who embraces AI doesn’t become redundant – they become exceptional. They stop drowning in noise and start doing the work they actually trained for. They bring their instincts, their experience and their judgment to the threats that matter because AI handled everything that didn’t need them. That’s not a smaller role. That’s a larger one.

This Is an Inflection Point, Not a Disruption

We are at an inflection point, not a disruption and the difference matters. Disruption implies that something is being broken. Inflection means we have reached a moment where the trajectory changes and the teams who understand that change will build something the others can’t catch up to.

The organizations that will win the next decade are not the ones who fear AI the least. They’re the ones who understood it the earliest. And the companies that will lead those organizations in security are the ones already building around that understanding — with the technology to back it and the people to make it matter.

AI-Native. Led by Humans. Together, Doing the Best Work in the Fight Against Cybercrime.

Fear makes sense when change moves fast and the benefits feel abstract. But the picture becomes clear when you stop asking “what will AI take from me?” and start asking “what has it been costing me not to have it?”

Consider what this looks like in practice. A financial services firm handling thousands of endpoints generates an overwhelming volume of alerts daily. A healthcare organization managing patient data across dozens of locations faces a threat surface that never sleeps and regulators who never blink. In both cases the problem isn’t the quality of the people. It’s the structure they’re forced to work inside.

At TENEX the numbers tell the story. Our AI SOC handles 100% of incoming alerts – nothing gets missed, nothing gets deprioritized because a human ran out of hours. It triages 95%+ autonomously with sub-minute response times. Those aren’t vanity metrics. They are the difference between an analyst drowning in noise and one doing the work they were actually trained for – hunting real threats, applying adversarial thinking and making the calls that protect the organization.

AI does not take your seat at the table – it pulls up a chair next to you and makes sure that when the moment that matters arrives, you’re ready for it. Your judgment still wins the room. AI just makes sure you arrive there on time and at your best.

That’s what we’re building at TENEX. Not a machine that replaces the best people in security but a platform that finally lets them do the work they were always meant to do. The people joining us today are not a footnote in our AI story. They are our story!

AI-Native. Human-Led. Because One Without the Other is Not Enough.