Security teams embrace agentic AI
Companies and their cybersecurity teams are leaning into the new agentic world, experts say.
Why it matters: Agentic AI can reduce workload and boost response times, but if it misfires, it could expose systems to serious threats.
The big picture: While chatbots respond to prompts, agentic AI goes a step further and takes approved actions based on its own findings.
Like any technological evolution, getting security teams to adopt AI takes time and education.
Building confidence in new AI-enabled security tools also comes with a unique threat: If an AI tool gets something wrong, it leaves an opening for spies and cybercriminals to break in.
Driving the news: Microsoft unveiled plans Monday to start previewing 11 new AI agents in Security Copilot next month.
CrowdStrike added agentic AI to its security tools last month, and Trend Micro rolled out autonomous agents and its own AI brain to customers last year.
Flashback: Just two years ago, major corporations were blocking employees from even opening ChatGPT for fears of data leaks.
Yes, but: The tides have turned, and security is one of the clearest use cases for generative AI — especially since the industry has long had a dearth of available workers and faces high burnout rates.
65% of CISOs said in a survey last summer that their organizations are considered either "early adopters" or "early majority" adopters of new AI technologies, which could be influencing their newfound trust in AI tools.
Half of the CISOs in that same survey also said they have developed some AI use cases or were piloting potential new AI projects for their teams.
Between the lines: Many security teams just want agentic AI to help sort through the thousands of threat notifications they receive daily and determine which ones are legitimate threats to their organizations.
When Microsoft customers first started playing around with their Security Copilot, they would stick to prescriptive use cases, like summarizing a recent incident, Dorothy Li, corporate VP of Microsoft Security Copilot, told Axios.
As they've become more comfortable, some users now let Copilot automate as much of their workflow as possible, she added, which inspired Microsoft to bring autonomous agents into the mix.
Many of those use cases involved responding to phishing alerts and notifications about vulnerabilities across the various tools in their stacks.
Zoom in: Last month, CrowdStrike added an agentic capability to its security-focused large language model that automatically triages notifications for customers' security operations teams.
Once implemented, the new tool can eliminate more than 40 hours of manual work per week, CrowdStrike estimates.
CrowdStrike tests its new agentic capabilities internally against its own analysts' findings to ensure the tools are accurate and don't take inappropriate actions before they're deployed.
That testing is key to building trust with customers, who include security teams in major corporations, Elia Zaitsev, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike, told Axios.
"Everything in the generative AI space, in particular, by pretty much every measurement I've seen, is being adopted quicker than any technology out there," Zaitsev said.
Reality check: A healthy amount of skepticism still remains in AI's promise for security teams, Zaitsev added.
"People need to see those hard, quantifiable metrics," he said. "They need to see there's real ROI."
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