What CRN’s 2026 Annual Report Card Says About the Next Phase of AI Security

AI security is entering a more demanding phase.

The market is moving beyond who can add AI to a product and toward who can make it useful in the real world — across existing security environments, partner ecosystems, and day-to-day operations.

CRN’s 2026 Annual Report Card offers a useful snapshot of that shift. In the AI Security category, Exabeam earned the top overall score at 90.6, leading all four subcategories and every one of the 21 individual evaluation criteria. CRN called Exabeam the “runaway winner” in the category and noted that the company achieved a “clean sweep” across all 21 criteria.

The result points to something bigger than product innovation alone: the next phase of AI security will be shaped by how well technology works in practice.

AI Security Has to Work Beyond the Demo

AI has become part of nearly every cybersecurity conversation. That does not mean every AI capability creates meaningful value.

Customers need technology that helps security teams detect, investigate, and respond more effectively. They need it to work with the infrastructure they already have. And they need confidence that the vendor and partner ecosystem behind it can support real-world deployment.

That is why the breadth of CRN’s scoring matters.

Solution providers evaluated vendors across product innovation, support, partnership, and managed and cloud services. The criteria included technical innovation, product compatibility, ease of integration, presales and post-sales support, communication, services opportunity, and profit potential.

Exabeam led across all of them.

The strongest scores included:

• 94.4 for technical innovation
• 98.3 for ease of doing business
• 95.7 for revenue and profit potential
• 93.4 for communication
• 96.9 for managed and cloud services profit potential

Those numbers tell a broader story. AI security leadership is not just about building sophisticated technology. It is about making that technology usable, supportable, and valuable across the customer lifecycle.

The Enterprise Has Become Agentic

The next major shift in security is not simply the adoption of AI. It is the emergence of the agentic enterprise.

Organizations are rapidly deploying AI agents, digital workers, autonomous workflows, and machine identities to perform tasks that were previously executed by people. These agents can access systems, retrieve sensitive data, invoke tools, make decisions, and trigger actions across the business.

As this new workforce grows, the security challenge changes fundamentally.

The question is no longer just, “Who has access?”

It becomes, “What are those identities actually doing?”

In a world where humans and AI agents operate side by side, behavior becomes the most important signal for understanding risk. Exabeam believes that securing the agentic enterprise requires visibility and intelligence across both human and non-human identities operating at machine speed.

Behavior Matters More as the Environment Changes

For more than a decade, Exabeam has focused on understanding behavior.

Today, organizations face a broader challenge. AI agents increasingly possess many of the same characteristics as employees. They have identities, permissions, data access, and the ability to take action. They can also be manipulated, misconfigured, overprivileged, or operate beyond their intended purpose.

The newest insider threat may not be human.

That creates an entirely new category of security challenge that cannot be solved through static policies or event-based detection alone.

When security teams can see patterns of behavior, they can identify meaningful deviations, surface anomalies, and expose risk that static rules or point-in-time signals may miss.

That is why Exabeam centers its approach on Behavior Intelligence: an operating model for securing the agentic enterprise that helps organizations understand expected behavior, identify risky behavior, and respond before that risk impacts the business. Unlike traditional approaches focused on isolated events, Behavior Intelligence analyzes patterns, interactions, and decisions over time across both human and non-human identities.

Customers Should Not Have to Start Over

There is another important dimension to this shift.

Most organizations are not looking to rip and replace the security stack they already own. They have years of investment in tools, workflows, data, and partner relationships.

Traditional SIEM platforms are effective at collecting events and answering the question, “What happened?” The next phase of AI security requires answering a more difficult question: “Was that behavior expected?” As organizations deploy thousands of human and non-human identities, understanding behavior becomes more valuable than simply collecting more telemetry.

That means AI security should help customers get more value from what they already have. It should integrate cleanly, support existing workflows, and reduce friction rather than create another silo.

The Exabeam strategy is built around that principle: an open, agnostic approach designed to work across existing security environments, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in the cloud.

This is also where partner strength matters.

CRN gave Exabeam its highest subcategory score in partnership, at 93.9, and highlighted particularly strong grades for ease of doing business, communication, and revenue and profit potential.

That is significant because partners see what customers need in practice. They know where technology creates friction, where integrations break down, and where new capabilities can create real services value.

Their feedback is an important test of whether innovation can actually scale.

The Next Phase of AI Security Will Be Measured by Outcomes

CRN described AI security as a “rapidly becoming a critical technology for the IT industry.” That feels right. And the recognition validates more than our products, services, and partner ecosystem. It validates a broader market transition.

Security is entering the era of the agentic enterprise.

As organizations deploy AI agents alongside human workers, risk will increasingly hide inside legitimate activity. The winners in this next phase of AI security will be the organizations that can understand behavior across people, machines, service accounts, and AI agents through a single behavioral risk model.

We believe Behavior Intelligence will become the foundation for securing the agentic enterprise, helping organizations adopt AI with confidence, accelerate security operations, and govern a workforce that is no longer entirely human.

That is the future we see emerging today, and the future Exabeam is building to lead.