How do you see the cybersecurity job market changing with AI? If you were a student today who wanted to get into security, what would you focus on learning or specializing in?

From the outside, cybersecurity looks like it is going through a very similar shift to software engineering: a lot of the repetitive/manual work is getting compressed by AI. Things like triage, basic analysis, writing detections, recon, and even parts of pen-testing are already being accelerated heavily, and I would expect that trend to continue. So I would be careful with any plan that is built around “I will specialize in the part that is mostly manual today,” because that is exactly where automation tends to hit first.

If I were a student today, I would focus less on tool-chasing and more on fundamentals that survive tooling changes: networking, operating systems, Linux internals, web security basics, authentication/authorization, cloud basics, scripting/programming, and how distributed systems actually work. Then I would build one strong specialization on top of that foundation. Good options are application security, cloud security, detection engineering, security engineering, identity/security around auth, or low-level/system security if that is where your strengths are. My bias would be toward areas closer to engineering and systems thinking, because those tend to age better than purely checklist-driven work.

I would also learn how to use AI well, not avoid it. The people who will do well are probably not the ones competing with AI on raw repetitive output, but the ones who can direct it, validate it, and plug it into real workflows safely. So a strong profile could be: solid systems fundamentals + one real security niche + ability to automate with code + good judgment. And if you are early on, build projects instead of only collecting certificates: harden a small cloud app, add auth correctly, set up logging/detection, write a few security automation scripts, maybe do some CTFs, and document your thinking. That demonstrates much more than just saying “I want to work in security.”