ASM and Microsoft: Strengthening semiconductor security with AI-driven defense

As one of the world’s leading semiconductor equipment manufacturers, ASM operates at the heart of critical supply chains. Its machines support the production of advanced chips that power everything from electric vehicles to space exploration. With such vital intellectual property, the company faces constant threats, not only from opportunistic attackers but also from highly sophisticated, state-sponsored adversaries. In this environment, the stakes are unusually high. As supply chain security becomes a matter of national resilience, ASM recognized that protecting its intellectual property is synonymous with protecting the industries that depend on it.

To strengthen their defenses, the security team leaned into Microsoft Security Copilot.

Leonard Ng, ASM’s head of infrastructure and cybersecurity, explains that cybersecurity is much like any war, in that, “You can’t possibly send a recruit to the frontlines without support.” The complexity of ASM’s global operations compounds the challenge. Each of its manufacturing sites is a potential target, and the company must guard against insider risk, espionage, and advanced phishing campaigns. With facilities and customers spanning Asia, Europe, and North America, the attack surface is as geographically distributed as it is technically complex. Traditional security measures are certainly necessary, but they might prove insufficient given the variety of security challenges. Ng emphasizes, “With our intellectual property at stake, it is clear we need more than a traditional defense. We need solutions that are intelligent and adaptive. Security Copilot is like having a military advisor standing right beside you.”

That combination of human expertise and AI-enabled decision support became the backbone of ASM’s security modernization strategy.

Accelerating to the speed of results

With Copilot, ASM found a way to translate that strategic intent into measurable operational gains.

Integrated across the Microsoft stack, Security Copilot provides analysts with the ability to query in plain language, aggregate signals from multiple tools, and receive actionable next steps within seconds. What once required jumping between consoles now appears in a single pane of glass. This has streamlined incident response and given ASM’s cybersecurity teams a more consistent framework for decision-making.

For junior analysts, Copilot offers a way to accelerate and improve the quality of their work. Muhaimin Omar, who leads global cybersecurity strategy and operations at ASM, notes that, “Security Copilot has been very positive. It has helped us a lot in our daily operations, especially for the junior staff. In a way, it has become a mentor for them.” By codifying institutional knowledge into Copilot workflows, ASM ensured that expertise was no longer confined to individuals but embedded across the entire SOC. Instead of relying exclusively on senior colleagues for guidance, junior staff can use Copilot to learn investigation techniques in real time, building both confidence and skills. This has freed senior analysts to focus on higher-value tasks such as threat hunting and playbook development. 

The platform also brings consistency. “Beyond being a mentor to our analysts,” Ng notes, “it serves as a guiding framework for decision-making and quality checkpoints in our investigations. This helps to ensure that every incident is addressed with speed and accuracy.” For ASM, this consistency is vital in an environment where one missed alert could have far-reaching consequences.

Time and resources saved for more strategic investments

The measurable results have been striking. ASM calculated that its analysts now save around 337 hours every week in investigation time—a dramatic efficiency gain that has been reinvested into other security initiatives. Alert triage times have been cut sharply. Omar cites the example of a suspected laptop compromise that would previously have taken approximately 25 minutes to resolve. With Security Copilot, the investigation was concluded in just eight minutes, a 68% reduction. This compounding effect (with less time spent on triage and more time available for proactive efforts) represents not just operational efficiency but a cultural shift toward resilience.

Beyond time savings, Security Copilot has enabled ASM to redeploy roughly 20% of its security operations staff toward strategic areas such as governance, risk, and compliance. This shift reflects a broader transformation: moving from reactive firefighting to proactive resilience. As Omar explains, “With Copilot we free a lot of our time so we can focus more on proactive stuff. Things like threat hunting, a lot of backlogs that we used to think we wouldn’t have time to complete, and now we have time to complete them.”

These benefits can be measured in minutes, sure, but they can also be measured in morale. Confidence and job satisfaction across the security team have improved as employees see their judgment reflected in Copilot’s guidance and have more space to focus on meaningful work. Ng summarizes it this way, “The results speak for themselves. Security Copilot not only helps us focus on what matters most, it opens new areas we can explore.” Omar agrees, noting, “We envision a future where AI is deeply embedded in every layer of our security stack, from detection to response to recovery. Our goal is to build a self-healing, intelligent security architecture that scales with our business.”  

By blending human judgment and AI precision, ASM is redefining what it means to protect intellectual property in the semiconductor era: faster, smarter, and more secure.