Organizations are embedding AI agents across the cyber stack, automating high-volume and repetitive tasks. This is not to replace human analysts, but to free them for the work that demands human judgment.
Technology architecture matters too. Sprawling estates of disconnected security tools create operational and financial costs. Bringing logs, signals and alerts together in a unified platform can give teams a full, real-time picture of all activities and behaviors occurring across an IT architecture. The best of these platforms will incorporate AI capabilities to identify threats and automate analytical and management tasks, including reverse-engineering malware, compiling actionable case summaries and predicting future vulnerabilities.
The third consideration is readiness for innovation: agentic security. AI agents can take the pressure off overwhelmed security operations center (SOC) analysts by automatically handling tasks such as data collection, threat prioritization, alert correlation and response planning.
The transition to an agentic SOC is already underway. Organizations are embedding AI agents across the cyber stack, automating high-volume and repetitive tasks. This is not to replace human analysts, but to free them for the work that demands human judgment.
In an agentic SOC, instead of spending hours manually triaging across multiple consoles just to reconstruct the full picture of a threat, analysts will increasingly delegate it to AI agents. This avoids slower response times and longer exposure windows, reducing cyber risks to the organization. Analysts can focus their time and skills on supervision, governance, context and the high-impact decisions for which human expertize remains essential.
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), a public research university in Belgium, illustrates the value of getting that foundation right. Academic freedom has resulted in a highly decentralized IT estate supporting thousands of researchers running their own systems, sensitive research and personal data. Just three engineers are able to operate detection and investigation across 64 billion events and more than 300 servers, because VUB has centralized its data, normalized it for analysis, and built detection and investigation capabilities on a foundation it can control.
Clear-eyed assessment