If your security operations team has ever felt like building SOAR automation was more painful than it was worth, Microsoft just dropped something that could change everything. Today, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Sentinel SOAR Playbook Generator — a completely new way to design and deploy security automation workflows using nothing but plain, conversational English. No more wrestling with rigid templates, no more bottlenecks waiting on your engineering team, and no more duct-taped workflows stretched across multiple dashboards.
In a new blog post published on the Microsoft Tech Community blog, Microsoft Sentinel team members detailed the launch of the new SOAR playbook generator as the “first milestone” in what they are calling a next-generation SOAR journey — one where AI and security teams work side by side to build smarter, faster, and more adaptable automations.
What’s Wrong With Traditional SOAR?
To understand why this announcement matters, it helps to understand the problem. SOAR technology — which stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response — has been a staple of enterprise security operations centers (SOCs) for years. The promise is simple: automate the repetitive, time-consuming parts of threat detection and response so your analysts can focus on the hard stuff.
But in practice, traditional SOAR has a lot of friction. Most solutions depend on rigid, pre-built templates that don’t adapt well to the specific needs of your environment. Action libraries are limited. If you need to connect to a third-party tool or build a workflow that doesn’t fit the template, you’re often looking at a time-intensive engineering project. And when your team is already stretched thin responding to active threats, the last thing you want is to spend weeks building the automation you needed yesterday.
Microsoft’s answer to this problem is the playbook generator — and it’s a significant step forward.
What Is the Microsoft Sentinel SOAR Playbook Generator?
At its core, the playbook generator is an AI coding agent embedded directly inside Visual Studio Code and integrated into the Microsoft Defender portal. Instead of designing playbooks through drag-and-drop interfaces or manually writing integration logic, security analysts can simply describe what they want the automation to do — in plain English — and the AI does the rest.
The system doesn’t just generate a blob of code and hand it back to you. It works through a guided, conversational process. You start in what Microsoft calls “plan mode” — you describe your goal, the AI asks clarifying questions, proposes a step-by-step plan, and then waits for your approval before doing anything. Once you give the green light, it switches to “act mode” and generates a full Python playbook, complete with documentation and a visual flowchart of the workflow.
That last part is worth highlighting. You get readable, modifiable code — not a black box. Engineers can review the logic, make manual edits, refine instructions through chat, or validate the playbook against real alerts at any time. This is automation that’s both fast and transparent, which is exactly what responsible security operations demand.
Why This Is a Big Deal for Security Teams
One of the most powerful aspects of the playbook generator is how it handles integrations. Traditionally, if you wanted to connect your SOAR workflow to a third-party tool — say, ServiceNow for ticketing or Slack for team notifications — you needed a predefined connector. That meant you were limited to whatever connectors your vendor had already built and maintained. Anything outside that list was a custom development project.
The Sentinel SOAR playbook generator blows that limitation wide open. By setting up an Integration Profile — which requires only a base URL, authentication method, and credentials — the AI can dynamically create API calls to virtually any service, Microsoft or otherwise. Need to pull data from a custom internal tool? Disable a compromised user account in Entra ID? Open a ticket in Jira and post a notification to Microsoft Teams, all from the same playbook? All of that is now describable in one natural language prompt.
Microsoft even provided an example prompt to illustrate just how simple the experience is:
“Based on the alert, extract the user principal name, check if the account exists in Entra ID, and if it does, disable the account, create a ticket in ServiceNow, and post a message to the security team channel.”
That single sentence can produce a complete, functional, multi-step security automation. For context, building that same workflow manually with legacy SOAR tools could take days.
Who Can Use It Right Now?
The playbook generator is available in preview today, and getting started requires a few things in place. First, your organization needs Microsoft Security Copilot enabled, with a workspace configured on either US or Europe-based capacity. Microsoft Security Copilot is the AI-powered security platform that underpins the experience — organizations using it have seen up to a 30% reduction in mean time to resolution for security incidents, according to Microsoft research.
You also need to have your Microsoft Sentinel workspace onboarded to the Microsoft Defender portal, which is where the playbook generator lives. From there, users need the Microsoft Sentinel Contributor role on the relevant workspaces or resource groups — the same permissions already required to author Automation Rules.
Once those prerequisites are in place, getting to your first generated playbook is straightforward:
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Go to the Automation tab in the Defender portal and select Create → Generated Playbook.
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Name your playbook and the embedded Visual Studio Code window opens automatically.
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Start in plan mode and describe your automation workflow in plain English
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Be specific: explain what data to extract, what actions to take, and any conditional branches
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Review and approve the AI’s proposed plan, then let it switch to act mode to generate the full Python code, documentation, and visual flow diagram
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Validate the playbook with real alerts, refine through chat, and deploy
Microsoft also recommends setting up Integration Profiles before you start building, particularly a Graph API integration, so the playbook generator has access to Microsoft Graph and any third-party services you plan to automate against.
What Early Users Are Saying
Preview customers have responded positively to the new experience. According to Microsoft, early testers report that the playbook generator speeds up automation development significantly, simplifies SOAR for teams that previously found it too complex, and enables workflow customization that wasn’t possible with template-based tools.
That feedback aligns with broader trends in AI-assisted security operations. Microsoft’s Security Copilot platform has an 89% positive user response rate for its guided response recommendations, and the integration of agentic AI capabilities is steadily moving security teams from reactive to proactive operations.
The Bigger Picture: AI Is Reshaping the SOC
Today’s announcement isn’t just a product update — it’s a signal about where enterprise security is heading. For years, cybersecurity has struggled with a talent gap. There simply aren’t enough experienced security engineers to staff every organization’s SOC at the level needed to keep up with modern threats. AI-powered tools like the Sentinel SOAR playbook generator directly address this gap by making it possible for analysts without deep coding backgrounds to build sophisticated automations that would previously have required specialist engineers.
Microsoft is clearly betting big on this direction. The playbook generator is explicitly positioned as the first milestone in a longer next-generation SOAR roadmap. That means today’s launch is just the beginning — more capabilities, deeper integrations, and more autonomous automation are on the way.
For enterprise security teams already invested in the Microsoft security stack — Sentinel, Defender, and Security Copilot — this is an immediate, practical upgrade to how your SOC operates. For organizations still evaluating their SOAR strategy, it’s a compelling reason to look closely at Microsoft’s platform.
Get Started Today
Microsoft has made it easy to explore the playbook generator. You can watch a live demo at aka.ms/NLSOARDEMO, and the full documentation with advanced scenarios and step-by-step guidance is available at Microsoft Learn.
The future of SOC automation isn’t years away — it just shipped. If your team is still building playbooks the old way, it might be time to have a very different kind of conversation with your security platform.
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