The rise of generative AI and large language models has drastically shifted the cybersecurity landscape, empowering attackers with easy-to-use tools that can create realistic video and voice deepfakes, personalized phishing campaigns, and malware and malicious code.
That has opened the door for AI on the defense as well. As agentic AI becomes more deeply embedded in the enterprise in areas like finance and legal, cybersecurity AI agents are on the rise, too, becoming a key asset for detection, analysis, and alerts.
“It’s a massive challenge to detect, contain, investigate and respond across larger companies,” said Brian Murphy, CEO of cybersecurity technology company ReliaQuest. “AI is allowing us to remove a lot of that noise, that tier one or tier two work, that work that’s often not at all relevant to something that could be threatening to an organization,” Murphy said.
Putting a tool in the hands of human workers that can automate otherwise menial tasks or time-consuming ones, freeing them to do more important work, has often been the pitch for agentic AI.
In a message shared with Amazon employees in June, CEO Andy Jassy said “We have strong conviction that AI agents will change how we all work and live,” adding that he sees a future with “billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field,” helping workers “focus less on rote work and more on thinking strategically” while also making “our jobs even more exciting and fun than they are today.”
