Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, is among the first organizations to put Microsoft’s new agentic security system to work. Facing adversaries who now regularly weaponize AI, the society is using Project Perception’s coordinated multi-agent defense—red, blue, and green agents working alongside its analysts—to find and remediate threats faster, while its security experts stay firmly in command. Their team has already seen work that once took weeks compressed into hours.
Defending against AI-driven threats
Nationwide Building Society is a member-owned mutual serving 19 million members across the UK, and that responsibility is becoming increasingly complex as AI reshapes the threat landscape. Attackers can now scale campaigns faster and automate more of their operations. "AI is giving attackers a real advantage over defenders in terms of pace and scale," says David Boda, Chief Security and Resilience Officer.
For its security teams, the mission is clear: protect the customers who trust the organization with some of the most important aspects of their lives. "The things that matter most are protecting their money, protecting their livelihoods." says Tim Russell, Cybersecurity Director.
For Nationwide Building Society, keeping pace means human-led, agent-driven defense that helps its team act faster, together and stay ahead.
Coordinated multi-agent defense, built on Microsoft Security
Nationwide Building Society’s response is to get ahead of the change in the threat landscape—identifying potential risks faster and accelerating response across its environment. Building on Microsoft Defender, which its teams have run for years, the society adopted Project Perception to bring coordinated multi-agent defense into its existing operations. "This solution for multi-agent defense allows us to move to a more proactive way of working," says Boda.
The system puts specialized agents to work as a team. "Red agents are offensive cyber agents used to explore the vulnerabilities and the attack paths in our environment. Blue agents are the defensive agents and reflect the work that a security operation center analyst might do," Boda explains, while green agents remediate and harden—with people in command throughout. "The power of the solution is it brings those agents together to achieve a better cybersecurity posture."
For analysts, that coordination removes long-standing friction. "We're able to use agentic workflows to identify threats and then track them through into remediation, which previously we would've had to have engaged with a number of different tools to achieve," says Russell.
Human-led, agent-driven defense
The impact is already tangible. "My team came to me and said, look, we've just taken four weeks of threat intelligence analysis and collapsed that down into four hours—and for me, that was the moment that really brought this to life," Boda recalls. Just as important to Nationwide Building Society is what the technology does for its people. "This technology helps to amplify their skill sets, not to replace them," says Russell.
For Nationwide Building Society, the future is humans and agents working as one. "Agents can work twenty-four-seven, but as humans, we can't do that. So, by harnessing humans and agents operating together, we can achieve so much more collectively," says Boda. And the ambition reaches further than the society itself: "Being able to develop this solution together with Microsoft allows us not just to protect Nationwide Building Society, but also to protect wider society—and that feels really positive."
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