Why Your SOC Isn’t Ready for AI—and What to Do About It

From chatbots to copilots to AI agents, the pace of innovation is relentless. While AI adoption is a popular talking point across the industry, most security operations centers (SOCs) are still in the early stages of adoption. The reality? Many of these AI tools aren’t built for the SOC at all.

If you’re evaluating AI for your security team, you need to know how to separate hype from help. That starts with a clear understanding of what AI agents really are and why they’re different.

What Are AI Agents and Why do They Matter for Security?

Agentic AI doesn’t just summarize or assist. It acts. These AI agents proactively investigate, recommend actions, and support multiple personas across the SOC—not just Tier 1 analysts. Unlike passive generative AI assistants, they don’t wait for a prompt. They work in the background to correlate data, collect evidence, and even queue up playbooks.

Exabeam Nova is one of the few true agentic AI solutions built for security. It’s not a chatbot. It’s a SOC-native, multi-agent AI system designed to augment the way your team works across detection, investigation, response, and reporting.

Most SOCs Aren’t Equipped to Use AI Effectively—Yet

The problem isn’t just the tools. It’s the workflows, data hygiene, and organizational readiness that determine whether AI delivers value. Many vendors are rebranding existing features with AI labels or relying on general-purpose large language models (LLMs). As Exabeam Chief Product Officer Steve Wilson noted in his DAVOS interview, “It’s easy to build a chatbot that sounds smart. It’s much harder to build one that delivers reliable, repeatable outcomes in a SOC.”

CISOs need to ask:

• Can this AI explain how it got to its recommendation?
• Is it integrated into our workflows or bolted on as a separate tool?
• Does it understand our data, risks, and use cases?
• Is it available at no additional cost, or is there a surcharge?

If the answer to any of these is “no,” it might be time to revisit your AI cybersecurity strategy.

Getting Your SOC AI Ready

According to Gartner’s 2024 AI Opportunity Radar, only 5% of organizations deploy AI in production, despite 25% claiming they plan to each year. The gap between ambition and execution is real—and it’s growing.

Getting your SOC AI ready doesn’t mean rushing adoption. It means:

• Establishing trusted data foundations. Without clean data, AI doesn’t work.
• Training analysts to partner with AI—not as prompt engineers but as decision makers
• Choosing vendors who build with—not just for—SOC teams

Conclusion

Agentic AI marks a shift in how security operations can function. It enables teams to act faster, make smarter decisions, and drive better outcomes through automation and context. But you won’t get there by plugging in costly, generic tools that weren’t purpose-built for the SOC.

You need AI designed for real-time security operations workflows, built into the system your team already uses. You need something like Exabeam Nova.

Read the white paper, A CISO’s Guide to the New Era of Agentic AI, to learn how AI agents are transforming security operations.