Adversarial AI attacks at machine speed surpass how fast SOC analysts can respond, forcing a new era of agentic AI cyberdefense.
When it takes just 51 seconds for attackers to breach and move laterally, SOC teams need more help. VentureBeat sees security leaders moving beyond manual triage toward automated responses that match machine-level speed.
Most SOC teams first aim to extend ROI from existing operations investments. Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Security Operations notes that organizations want more value from current tools while enhancing them with AI to handle an expansive threat landscape.
William Blair & Company’s Sept. 18 note on CrowdStrike predicts that “agentic AI potentially represents a 100x opportunity in terms of the number of assets to secure,” with TAM projected to grow from $140 billion this year to $300 billion by 2030.
Agentic AI needs strong governance to scale
For agentic AI to realize this potential, governance must mature. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz warned at FalCon 2025: “An AI agent is like giving an intern full access to your network… You gotta put some guardrails around the intern.”
Kurtz’s observation reflects concerns among SOC leaders and CISOs across industries. VentureBeat sees enterprises experimenting with differentiated architectures to solve governance challenges.
Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks, offered a complementary view in a VentureBeat interview: “Cato uses AI extensively… But AI alone can’t solve the range of problems facing IT teams. The right architecture is important both for gathering the data needed to drive AI engines, but also to tackle challenges like agility, connecting enterprise edges, and user experience.”
Kramer added, “Good AI starts with good data. Cato logs petabytes weekly, capturing metadata from every transaction across the SASE Cloud Platform. We enrich that data lake with hundreds of threat feeds, enabling threat hunting, anomaly detection, and network degradation detection.”
Strong governance is the glue unifying data lakes, SASE infrastructure, and agentic AI platforms into a coherent strategy.
As enterprises face William Blair’s projection of a 100x expansion in assets to secure, the following ten agentic AI technologies will be critical to safeguarding SOCs at scale while ensuring governance:
1. Charlotte AI AgentWorks
Why it matters: CrowdStrike’s AgentWorks evolves Charlotte from an AI assistant to an autonomous SOC orchestrator, deploying specialized agents trained on 14 years of labeled threat telemetry. These agents learn from workflows, generate automations, and mirror analyst reasoning patterns. The platform’s trillion-event dataset provides contextual training that new competitors are still building. Entry point for autonomous operations on the FalCon platform.
Enterprise insight. AgentWorks joins Microsoft Copilot for Security, Palo Alto XSIAM, SentinelOne Purple AI, Google SecLM and IBM QRadar Assistant in the agentic SOC market. CrowdStrike’s differentiator is domain-specific training data accumulated over 14 years. VentureBeat is seeing the most successful deployments start narrow.
2. Threat AI Agents: Autonomous defense at machine speed
Why it matters: Threat AI deploys autonomous agents that detect, analyze, and respond to threats without human intervention. Adam Meyers emphasized during his keynote at FalCon that these “mission-ready agents that reason, decide, and act” are essential because “adversaries are moving faster than ever before, and they’re doing it in a way that is stealthier than ever before.”
Enterprise insight: Competing approaches include Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk SOAR, Palo Alto Cortex XSIAM, SentinelOne Purple AI and Google SecLM. CrowdStrike differentiates by consolidating telemetry through its single-sensor architecture and 14 years of labeled threat data.
3. Pangea Agent Protection: Enterprise-grade AI governance
Why it matters: CrowdStrike’s acquisition of Pangea embeds runtime protection for AI agents directly into Falcon. The platform shields enterprises from prompt injection, malicious tool calls, data exfiltration, and unsafe agent behavior across browsers, SaaS, cloud, and developer pipelines. By building these controls into the core platform, CrowdStrike gives security leaders unified visibility and enforceable guardrails for scaling AI safely.
Enterprise insight: Competitors include Robust Intelligence (owned by Cisco), Protect AI (owned by Palo Alto Networks), and Microsoft Copilot governance. CrowdStrike integrates Pangea as an enterprise-wide AI agent protection tied directly to Falcon’s telemetry and policy framework.
4. Falcon for IT: Intelligence-driven vulnerability prioritization
Why it matters: Falcon for IT prioritizes patches based on real-world exploitation data rather than theoretical CVSS scores. Mike Sentonas noted during his keynote that “thousands of vulnerabilities are published each month, but only a small fraction are ever exploited in the wild,” making risk-based prioritization essential for resource-constrained teams.
Enterprise insight: CrowdStrike’s approach stands out for pairing adversary intelligence with vulnerability management, helping teams focus on exposures most likely to be weaponized. Other vendors add valuable dimensions to this space. Qualys provides broad coverage and compliance-oriented visibility, while Tanium is strong at orchestrating automated remediation workflows across large fleets. Cato Networks’ application vulnerability scanning brings additional context from the network layer, and Ivanti extends risk reduction through its patch automation and asset intelligence capabilities. Together, these complementary approaches illustrate how enterprises can build a layered, intelligence-driven strategy for prioritizing and addressing vulnerabilities.
5. Onum Streaming Telemetry: Real-time intelligence pipeline
Why it matters: Onum processes security telemetry in real-time, eliminating batch processing delays. Mike Sentonas explained that it provides “control over the railroad tracks of security data,” enabling “sub-second detections that match adversary breakout times.”
Enterprise insight: Security teams face surging telemetry volumes and rising cost pressures. Onum highlights the shift toward real-time, security-tuned pipelines. Cribl and Splunk cover broad log processing, Confluent anchors Kafka ecosystems, Elastic serves hybrid IT/OT, and Ivanti links telemetry to patch and asset intelligence.
6. Unified Enterprise Graph: Contextual Intelligence at memory speed
Why it matters: The Enterprise Graph creates a real-time digital twin linking identities, endpoints, and cloud resources. Elia Zaitsev described it as delivering “unified real-time context across assets, identities, data, and everything else that makes up your IT environment” during his keynote at FalCon.
Enterprise insight: Vendors are converging on graph-based approaches to unify security context across assets and identities. Microsoft emphasizes identity, Neo4j offers deep customization, and ServiceNow integrates closely with IT asset management. CrowdStrike’s graph positions itself on multi-cloud correlation and long-term trend analysis.
7. Malware Analysis Agent: Automated reverse engineering
Why it matters: The Malware Analysis Agent automates malware reverse engineering, reducing analysis from hours to seconds. Adam Meyers and others frequently referred to the agent during their keynotes. Meyers said that the Malware Analysis Agent “transforms malware analysis from hours to minutes” while “instantly feeding new detection rules back into the Falcon graph.”
Enterprise insight: Automated malware analysis is becoming central to SOC efficiency. Palo Alto’s WildFire is widely used for zero-day detection, VMRay and Joe Sandbox offer deep behavioral analysis for specialists. At the same time, CrowdStrike emphasizes speed and correlation at scale through integrated telemetry.
8. Agentic Fusion SOAR: Intent-driven security orchestration
Why it matters: Fusion SOAR translates natural language into automated workflows without coding. Mike Sentonas explained during his keynote, “analysts describe an outcome and Charlotte dynamically builds and executes the workflow,” eliminating static playbooks.
Enterprise insight: Low-code and natural language orchestration are reshaping SOAR. FortiSOAR emphasizes broad multi-vendor integration, Phantom requires more profound technical expertise, and Cato Networks applies orchestration within SASE environments. Fusion reflects the trend toward simplifying automation for endpoint-focused workflows.
9. Hunt Agent: Proactive discovery at machine scale
Why it matters: The Hunt Agent automates threat hunting by generating and testing hypotheses autonomously. Adam Meyers noted during his keynote that it “transforms threat hunting from elite art to scalable science” through continuous pattern analysis.
Enterprise insight: Automated hypothesis generation marks a shift from static queries to machine-driven hunting. Mandiant is known for threat actor profiling, Vectra AI for insider risk detection, and Elastic for DevOps-oriented flexibility. CrowdStrike positions hunting as a scalable, cross-domain capability.
10. Governance by Design: Transparent autonomous operations
Why it matters: Governance ensures AI agents operate within defined boundaries with full auditability. Kurtz stressed during this keynote that “without visibility and compliance, no regulated customer will deploy AI agents.”
Enterprise insight: Governance is becoming essential for operationalizing AI in regulated industries. Microsoft emphasizes configurability, Google BeyondCorp anchors zero-trust models, and OpenAI highlights model flexibility. Built-in enforcement and auditability are increasingly valued by financial and highly regulated enterprises.
Bottom line
William Blair’s projected 100x asset expansion demands industry-wide collaboration. Success defeating adversarial AI requires unified architectures, embedded governance, and vendors working together rather than competing. Adversaries collaborate; defenders must do the same. Architecture and partnerships need to guide the future of agentic AI in the SOC to ensure its success.
