We talk a lot about alert fatigue. We talk about burnout, staffing shortages, and tool overload. But there’s something we don’t talk about enough: the hidden tax that every security team pays just to operate.

At 7AI, we call it the False-Positive Tariff.

What Is the False-Positive Tariff?

Every time your security stack sends an alert that turns out to be a non-issue — a misfire, a duplicate, a false alarm — your analysts still have to investigate it. They still spend the time, they still carry the mental load, and your team still foots the bill.

Multiply that by thousands or millions of alerts per year, and you’re looking at a massive operational cost that’s not reflected on your vendor invoices — but is very real on your balance sheet and your burnout curve.

This is the False-Positive Tariff:

A tax on every alert that wasn’t worth your team’s time, but still demanded it.

Why “Tariff” Is the Right Word

A tariff, by definition, is a tax placed on imported goods — not paid by the sender, but by the recipient. And that’s exactly what’s happening in security.

You’re importing alerts from dozens of external tools: phishing filters, EDR platforms, threat intel feeds. Your team isn’t the one generating them — but you’re the one paying the price to process them. Not in dollars directly, but in time, attention, and opportunity cost.

It’s not just alert fatigue — it’s alert economics.

And the False-Positive Tariff is bleeding security teams dry.

The Cost in Time and Dollars

In just our first 90 days since launch, 7AI has autonomously investigated millions of alerts across customer environments. If human analysts had reviewed each of those alerts manually, it would’ve cost over millions of hours and dollars in analyst time.

That’s not just time saved.

That’s time rescued from being wasted.

Because many of those alerts?

They weren’t real. A security tool cried wolf. But in traditional SOCs, they would have been investigated anyway.

Why This Is Different

7AI is built on a different model: agentic autonomy. Instead of sending every alert to a human, our agents investigate, correlate, and close out alerts without prompting, playbooks, or dashboards. They eliminate false positives before they ever touch human eyes.

No false-positive, no tariff.

The Question We Ask

On our new podcast Do Human Work, (coming very soon!) we ask every CISO the same question:

“If I could give you back 25% of your time, what would you do with it?”

It’s more than a thought experiment. It’s what agentic security enables. And it includes cutting out the false-positive tariff your team has been silently paying for years.

Time to Stop Paying

Burnout is expensive. So is wasted time. So are security incidents that slip through because your team is too buried in meaningless noise to focus on what matters.

It’s time to stop paying for work that doesn’t need to happen.

It’s time to retire the false-positive tariff — for good.