SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help security teams do things that aren’t humanly possible, like evaluate billions of suspicious signals in real time and pare those down to just a handful of likely security incidents for analysts to investigate. But, despite her company’s willingness to sing AI’s praises in its security products, AI is not enough, said Ann Johnson, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Solutions Group.

“We need to combine AI with that human empathy,” she said during an RSA Conference keynote. “We need both humans and technology working together. We need to embrace the human spirit that we have in cybersecurity.”

There’s a sense of urgency to Johnson’s call to invest in people as the black hats are also using AI to attack everything from cities and presidential elections to the upcoming Tokyo Olympics.

“Take it from me that in cybersecurity, investing in the human element will always give the good guys an edge,” Johnson said. “And we absolutely can’t wait. I’m not an alarmist, but the stakes are getting higher. Attackers are targeting everything: intellectual property, critical infrastructure, and elections.”

She called on private companies and governments to work together, and said lawmakers need to update technology laws “that were generated and produced during the typewriter era” to protect people and organizations from today’s nation-state attacks and cyber criminals. “The consequences of inaction among our leaders is enormous,” Johnson said. “But they’re not entirely unpredictable.”

Johnson cited the first-ever U.S. Senate hearings on cybersecurity in 1998 during which hackers briefed senators about challenges and threats — many of which still exist today. She also referenced an 11-year-old who, in 2018, hacked a voting machine at DefCon in under two minutes, and Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, who’s Twitter feed shows her hacking a similar system. Government officials and society at large need to listen to these white hat hackers, Johnson said.

“There’s no reason to believe that cybercrime is going anywhere,” she said. “However, there has also always existed this temptation to believe that a technological utopia, a perfect solution is around the corner. That certainly does drive innovation, and we will always keep searching for that silver bullet for cybercrime. But I do not believe that artificial intelligence, however advanced it becomes, is going to be the perfect solution in our lifetime.”