Closing Critical Cybersecurity Gaps: How
Agentic AI is Reshaping CISOs' Strategy

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Security leaders face intensifying pressure from all angles. With attack volumes rising, AI-generated threats outpacing traditional defences, and analyst burnout on the rise, the cybersecurity landscape is demanding more than conventional responses. But AI offers a unique strategic inflection point—particularly through agentic AI, which elevates the role of security tools from reactive helpers to proactive partners.

A recent PwC survey from May 2025 showed that 79% of senior executives report AI agents are already in use in their organisations, and 66% of those report productivity gains. However, while adoption is broad, deep integration remains limited: only 35% say they’ve adopted agents broadly, and under half have redesigned workflows around them, the CUBE research team reports.

Meanwhile, as reported by Axios (March 2025), leading security teams are increasingly turning to agentic AI to manage alert overload and accelerate triage. Unlike chatbots that merely respond, these AI agents can take pre-approved actions autonomously.

As AI continues to evolve, Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) face a pressing question: Can AI do more than automate tasks and summarise data? Is the key to successfully scaling security operations the deployment of agentic AI that not only provides insight into emerging threats but also empowers strategic decision-making?

Expanding Threats, Overwhelmed Teams

Across industries, the story is the same - the threat landscape keeps expanding, but resources, tools, and security teams can’t keep pace.

Modern CISOs are facing more pressure than ever as threats continue to advance, and the cybersecurity skills gap remains as wide as ever. Too often, new technologies promise transformation but only add more complexity, more dashboards, and more to configure. AI is no exception in this field.

Instead of delivering what CISOs really need, many solutions simply add on a chatbot or offer rebranded tools that fail to effectively reduce analyst workloads. CISOs are left to firefight reoccurring challenges, including:

Overwhelming Datapoints. Alert volumes continue to climb. CISOs are left constantly balancing signal and noise, driving up alert fatigue. The challenge of sifting through countless daily alerts increases the risk of missing real threats, as well as increasing strain on analysts.

Increasingly Sophisticated Threats. Modern threats, especially those generated by AI, move too fast and mutate too often for traditional detection methods to keep up. Existing threat intelligence feeds and rule-based systems often fall short when faced with novel or signatureless attacks.

Burnout from Repetitive Tasks. Analysts still spend hours on repetitive manual tasks, such as reviewing logs or responding to low-level alerts. This not only leads to inefficiencies but lowers morale and drives higher staff turnover, which carries the danger of weakening an organisation’s overall security posture.

Lack of Consolidation. CISOs are frequently left piecing together reports from disparate tools or manually chasing metrics from their teams. This creates lag, uncertainty, and missed opportunities to demonstrate progress or justify investments.

More than ever, CISOs need security tools that can help them overcome the most critical security operations centre (SOC) challenges, rather than add to their workloads. They need tools that go beyond just collecting insight by proactively pinpointing gaps, tuning strategies, and delivering measurable return on investment (ROI).

Security Built for CISOs

In today’s fast-moving threat environment, every second counts. This is why CISOs need all the support they can get from intuitive, AI-driven security tools.

Agentic AI is changing the game by transforming what CISO outcomes look like. It can reason across datasets, adapts to new input, and stays aligned with the organisation’s policies. With this, security leaders gain a much-needed tool that is not only context-aware but can act and support strategic decision-making. When implemented well,