Immersive unveils AI Lab Builder to boost cyber readiness skills

Immersive has introduced an AI-powered Lab Builder feature within its Immersive One platform to enable organisations to tailor cybersecurity skills development to their specific requirements.

The new Lab Builder aims to help cyber leaders create hands-on cyber exercises and simulations that are customised for their teams. These exercises include offensive, defensive, and secure coding scenarios, and are designed to enhance workforce readiness against threats that reflect real-world situations.

According to the company, the crucial role the human element plays in cyber incidents makes focused cyber skills training increasingly important. Global organisations experience an average yearly cost of USD $4.88 million due to cyber attacks, yet decision-makers currently spend only 39% of their time assessing and improving their cyber resilience. Immersive intends for its Lab Builder feature to assist leaders in addressing these ongoing challenges.

AI-driven customisation

Key to the Lab Builder feature is an AI agent that automates the creation of customised labs for customers, including those reflecting current threat landscapes and application security scenarios. By making use of Immersive's content library and authoring tools, this AI agent is able to rapidly generate labs that are tailored to an organisation's requirements, helping to reduce the manual effort involved in building exercises.

"Our Immersive One platform has gotten even more powerful with our AI-enabled Lab Builder feature, which allows our customers and partners to quickly create tailored learning experiences as part of a holistic cyber readiness program," said Thanos Karpouzis, Chief Technology Officer at Immersive. "We're seeing growing demand for practical, hands-on cybersecurity labs and exercises that mirror real-world scenarios and environments. Leaders gain unmatched agility with hyper-relevant training for their unique use-cases, improving their organisation's overall cyber resilience."

The Lab Builder is designed to support the creation of exercises that are mapped to specific business needs, internal systems and threat models. According to Immersive, this results in targeted upskilling that can cover both theoretical knowledge and practical skills, providing measurable outcomes for cyber competency.

Flexibility for partners and customers

The feature provides opportunities not only for direct customers, but also for Immersive's partners. For partners, Lab Builder makes it possible to offer services and cyber training aligned with their own or customers' requirements, adding bespoke hands-on scenarios and increasing the value of their offerings.

Lab Builder provides two central types of lab environments:

• Theory Labs: Interactive content aimed at building knowledge of cybersecurity policies, concepts, and specialised topics, enabling users to understand the theory underpinning cyber skills.
• Practical Labs: Simulations that allow for hands-on application of skills within organisational tools and environments, designed to test user competency and the application of knowledge.

Users can utilise either type independently or combine them into multi-activity lab scenarios, which enables comprehensive training and assessment capabilities for organisations. This blended approach provides both foundational understanding and real-world practice under one platform.

Key benefits highlighted

According to Immersive, core advantages of the Lab Builder include the ability to structure and assign both theory and practical labs via central management in the Immersive One platform, aligning with learning paths tailored to individuals and teams. Other reported benefits are the ability to map content to internal standards for compliance and audit-readiness, more accurate measurement of skills through both theoretical and practical assessment, and the delivery of practice environments that closely mirror live production settings.

The launch of Lab Builder follows the company's introduction of its AI Scenario Generator in 2024, which allows organisations to produce crisis simulation scenarios for workforce response training. Both solutions are now available within the Immersive One platform, which brings together cyber drills, exercises, simulations and labs into a continuous practice protocol aimed at strengthening organisational preparedness for cyber threats.

Immersive states that its platform is already used by large global organisations and government bodies, and that this new feature provides further tools for teams to measure and develop cyber readiness at all levels.