The Key Points 

The Math That Doesn't Work

Many enterprises have 5,000+ vulnerabilities, fix maybe 5% annually at $10,000 per fix. Even if you're excellent and clear 15% while adding only 10% new vulnerabilities each year, you'll reach 1,000 remaining vulnerabilities in 44 years. And that's before AI hackers really get to work.

What Automated Remediation Changes

AI-enabled products can now fix security issues for 1/10 to 1/100th of the $5,000-$20,000 for manual remediation. The book walks through evaluating, implementing, and succeeding with automated code remediation—turning AppSec from a bottleneck into an accelerator.

Top 5 Questions from the Read-Along

1. How do I build a business case my CFO will actually approve?

The book provides specific ROI frameworks showing 10X cost reduction and 20X speed improvement. For 10,000 vulnerabilities, manual remediation costs $50M+ over decades. Automation costs far less and clears the backlog in months.

2. What's the real accuracy of automated fixes?

Leading tools demonstrate 97% triage accuracy on 25,000+ test cases and 93% fix accuracy validated by external experts. The book emphasizes evaluating vendors on published, transparent benchmark results rather than marketing claims. Nothing is perfect, but the real bar is better than human. In one example, developers were able to clear vulnerabilities in 8.2 minutes per vulnerability in code they had never seen before.

3. How does this work with our existing SAST tools?

Automated remediation integrates with existing tools like Blackduck, Checkmarx, Fortify, Veracode, SonarQube, and more. You keep your current scanning infrastructure and add the fix layer—no rip-and-replace required.

        4.  What about security risks of the AI tools themselves?

Part IV covers security considerations extensively, including OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. The book recommends supervised implementation where humans approve fixes before deployment, treating automation like code review rather than autonomous deployment.

5. When should we actually implement this?

Chapter 10 provides a readiness self-assessment. You're ready when:

• Vulnerability backlog grows quarterly
• Developers spend more than 10% of time on security fixes
• Average fix time exceeds 30 days
• Security blocks product releases