AI penetration testing slashes costs from $50K to minutes
Source: The Next Web
Intruder's automated pentest tool erodes the economic moat protecting penetration testing as a high-friction, high-cost service. Historically, cost alone gatekept the work to well-funded enterprises. The shift from weeks-long manual engagements to minutes of AI-driven scanning will fragment the market: commodity vulnerability detection becomes cheaper and continuous, while human pentesters either specialize in complex social engineering and threat modeling, or face margin compression. This pattern appeared in code review and legal discovery, where AI commoditizes routine work but doesn't eliminate skilled practitioners—it forces repositioning.