With the changes to the market of late, Atredis has actually been exceedingly busy.

We've been working with AI and related tech since we started the company over a dozen years ago, but in the last year, like everyone, our work has changed: we're testing more AI, we're testing more with AI, and we're using AI to test AI.

A big point of pride for us has always been our non-sales sales strategy: we don't make pitches, we listen to people and work with them to figure out how we can help, and we're not afraid to say no if we're not the right folks for the job, or tell somebody why we have a better approach than what they initially ask for.

Lately, our approach to testing and AI seems to resonate with people. It's pretty simple:

We don't do AI-Driven testing. We do Human-Powered testing that uses AI, and the human matters a lot, because we have the best humans for the job.

No matter how high and how fast AI continues to raise the bar, there will always be a gap (a narrowing one, yes, but a gap nonetheless) between what the proverbial million monkeys typing at a million typewriters are capable of, and what they're capable of with a smart and skilled human in the driver's' seat.

A big part of the culture we built here, including being 100% employee owned, with a culture based in workplace democracy, is attracting and keeping the most talented and respected folks in our field.

We've been doing this work for a very long time. We're very selective in who we hire, and the minimum tenure in our field just to work here is five years. There are a lot of grey heads around this place that have been doing this stuff for decades -- I've been at it 30 years myself.

During that 30 years I've been told pentesting is dead more times than I can count, and almost always in the context that automation was going to replace the average pentester.

My response remains the same as it's always been: that's really bad news for the average pentester, but who wants to be average?

There's an episode in season three of the Bear where Cousin Ritchie spends a week working at a restaurant named Ever, loosely based on Eleven Madison Park, the sort of place where staff puts their passion into every second and folks wait months for a table.

Every Atredian who watched that episode had the same reaction I did: That's us.

We put our heart and soul into what we do and we have a team of some of the best people in the world to do it. The bar for "best" keeps getting higher, but it always has, and that's okay.

We're not for everyone, and there are a lot of people who will be quite happy with their $10K Agentic Swarm McPentests, but those people were NetSPI, Dell, and Coalfire clients a year ago, not ours. Like I said, bad news for the average pentester.

Turns out there are enough people who know us, and know the difference between us and our competitors, human and otherwise, to keep this team of very smart humans (and our ever-smarter bot helpers) busy for a long time.