Littlefish teams with ContraForce on AI security tools

Littlefish Group has partnered with ContraForce to add AI-based tools to its managed security operations.

The partnership centres on Littlefish's Managed Security Operations Centre, where ContraForce's software will support the investigation, assessment, prioritisation and mitigation of security incidents. The system is intended to cut the time needed to identify potential risks, while leaving final decisions to cyber analysts.

Businesses are adopting AI more widely across their operations, while security teams are also facing attackers using the same technology to increase the speed and scale of their activity. That is pushing managed security providers to find ways to process larger volumes of alerts without removing human oversight from response work.

The arrangement extends Littlefish's Microsoft-based security operations, with ContraForce acting as a delivery layer above those systems. The technology is designed to handle early-stage triage, context gathering and incident classification, allowing analysts to focus on judgement, response actions and broader risk reduction.

The companies said incidents that might previously have taken hours to assess could be reviewed in seconds or minutes. Littlefish described the model as an enhancement of existing teams rather than a replacement, with governance, control and accountability remaining with experienced security staff.

Human oversight

The Nottingham-based technology services group provides cyber security, managed services, cloud, data and business technology consulting to customers in the UK, Ireland and other markets. It said the agreement reflects a broader push to help clients use new technologies while managing operational and security risks.

Sean Tickle, Head of Cyber Security at Littlefish Group, outlined the company's view of how AI should be used in security operations.

"AI is changing the cyber security landscape on both sides of the equation. Organisations are exploring how it can help them move faster and deliver more value, while attackers are using the same technology to become more sophisticated and harder to detect. We believe the answer isn't to replace people with AI. The real power comes from combining intelligent AI context and workflows with human expertise. AI can process information at incredible speed, but context, judgement and accountability remain essential when the stakes are high. This partnership allows us to give our analysts better intelligence, faster, helping them focus on protecting our customers and enabling them to adopt new technologies with greater confidence," said Sean Tickle, Head of Cyber Security at Littlefish Group.

ContraForce develops software for security teams and service providers using Microsoft security products. Its platform is designed to take incidents through stages including triage, investigation, response, tuning, ticketing and customer reporting, based on procedures set by the provider.

The partnership reflects a broader trend in cyber security towards combining automated analysis with human review, particularly in managed security operations centres that must handle high alert volumes across multiple customers. Providers face pressure to maintain response standards as each additional client brings different systems, workloads and expectations.

Stan Golubchik, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at ContraForce, said the challenge grows with scale.

"Running a SOC is one of the most critical services delivered to businesses today, and one of the hardest to run well. At scale, it gets harder still, because every client a provider adds brings its own environment, its own alert volume and its own expectations, and the standard has to hold across all of them. This partnership lets Littlefish's SOC put intelligent AI agents alongside analysts rather than in place of them, cutting the time it takes to separate real threats from noise and act on them. The result is faster and broader coverage for every client Littlefish protects, enabling its analysts to meet AI-driven threats. Littlefish's specialists have always been world-class defenders. What changes now is reach. Their expertise arrives at every incident, for every client, at machine speed," said Stan Golubchik, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at ContraForce.

Littlefish supports more than 1 million users globally across public and private sector organisations. Its work spans digital solutions, cyber services, managed services, and data and AI, placing it among IT services firms seeking to tie cyber security offerings more closely to wider technology transformation projects.

For managed security providers, that strategy increasingly depends on showing that AI can improve the speed of incident handling without reducing control over sensitive systems and data. In Littlefish's model, analysts remain at the centre of every decision, with the software used to surface information more quickly and free staff to spend more time on resilience and risk reduction.