Beyond Speed: Why MTTHI is the Only ROI Metric That Matters for the AI-Era SOC
For a decade, the Board has asked us the same two questions: “How fast did we see it?” and “How fast did we fix it?”
We gave them MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) and MTTR (Mean Time to Respond). These metrics were fine when the bottleneck was human eyes and human fingers. If an analyst could triage 15 alerts an hour instead of 10, the “speed” improved, and we called it a win.
But we are entering the era of the Agentic SOC.
When you deploy autonomous AI agents like Dropzone AI, Torq Socrates, or CrowdStrike’s Charlotte AI, measuring “speed per alert” becomes a vanity metric. If an AI agent triages 10,000 alerts in 4 seconds, your MTTD looks amazing, but has your business risk actually changed? Not necessarily.
If you want to prove ROI to a CFO who is tired of hearing about “threat landscapes,” you need to stop talking about how fast your tools are and start talking about how rarely your humans are interrupted.
It’s time to track MTTHI: Mean Time to Human Intervention.
The Death of the Tier-1 Analyst
In a traditional SOC, Tier-1 is a meat grinder. Humans spend 90% of their time performing “biological data enrichment”—copy-pasting IP addresses into VirusTotal, checking Okta logs for “impossible travel,” and asking users over Slack, “Hey, did you actually log in from a VPN in Paris?”
This is not cybersecurity; it’s high-stress data entry.
Agentic AI has reached a tipping point where it doesn’t just “assist” the analyst; it replaces the workflow.
Dropzone AI doesn’t just flag an alert; it performs the full investigation, pulls the PCAPs, and writes the summary.
Torq Socrates doesn’t just wait for a trigger; it reasons through the case and executes the containment.
In this environment, Speed (MTTD) is a commodity. The real value is Autonomy.
If your AI agents are truly effective, your Tier-1 analysts should be bored. If they aren't, you've bought a faster treadmill, not a vehicle.
Defining MTTHI (Mean Time to Human Intervention)
MTTHI measures the duration between an alert firing and a human being required to take action.
In a world of 80%+ autonomous automation:
The Goal is Infinity: For 4 out of 5 alerts, the MTTHI should be infinite. The human never touches it. The agent detects, investigates, confirms it’s a false positive (or a benign true positive), and closes the ticket.
The Value is the Gap: The “Profit Margin” of your SOC is the cumulative time between when the AI takes over an alert and when (if ever) a human is paged.
MTTD proves your tools work. MTTR proves your process works. MTTHI proves your investment works.
How to Speak “CFO” (The MTTHI Savings Report)
Your CFO doesn’t care about “alert fatigue.” They care about Capacity and OpEx.
When you present your quarterly report, stop showing slides of “Blocked Attacks.” Instead, show a slide titled “Operational Reinvestment: MTTHI Savings.”
The Formula:
(Total Alerts Handled by AI) x (Average Human Triage Time) = MTTHI Savings
If your team used to spend 20 minutes investigating a standard phishing alert, and your AI agents now handle 2,000 of those a month with zero human intervention, you haven’t just “improved speed.” You have reclaimed 666 man-hours.
That is the equivalent of four full-time Tier-1 analysts. You aren’t asking the Board for more budget; you are showing them how you converted raw alert noise into high-value Tier-3 capacity.
The Tier-3 Pivot: Where the Human Belongs
When MTTHI is high (meaning the AI handled the bulk of the work), the human intervention that does occur is finally high-value.
When a human is finally “interrupted” by a notification from Charlotte AI or Dropzone, they aren’t starting from scratch. They are stepping into a pre-investigated crime scene. They are acting as the Judge, not the Clerk.
This shifts your SOC from a Reactive Cost Center to a Proactive Risk Engine:
Instead of triaging 500 “failed login” alerts, your senior analysts are now Threat Hunting for novel TTPs.
Instead of clearing a backlog, they are tuning the AI agents to be even more autonomous.
They are doing the work that prevents the breach, rather than the work that merely documents it.
The time your analysts spend on tasks now handled by agents is your SOC’s profit margin. Report it that way.
The Actionable Insight for 2026
If you are currently evaluating or running agentic AI, start tracking the “Touch Rate.” What percentage of your alerts require a human to click a button? If that number is higher than 20%, you don’t have an AI problem; you have a trust or a process problem.
The Bottom Line: Stop reporting on how fast your team is running. Start reporting on how much time they’ve stopped wasting. MTTHI is the metric of the profitable CISO.