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Mind the Trust Gap: Strike48 CISO Survey Finds Lack of Trust in AI Agents Is the Main Barrier to Adoption
New survey data finds 84% of security leaders agree AI agents should be doing L1 tasks, but only 22% are ready to fully automate anything. 71% cited unintended agent actions as a top trust concern
BOSTON, May 07, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Strike48, the agentic security operations platform, today released The State of Agentic Security 2026: Breaking Through the Trust Barrier, a survey of 100 cybersecurity leaders examining where defenders actually stand on AI agents in the SOC. The research reveals a 62-point gap between what security leaders believe should happen and what they are willing to deploy, with implications for how the cybersecurity industry adapts to AI-augmented adversaries.
The study finds that while 84% of respondents agree AI agents should be handling Level 1 SOC work, only 22% are ready to fully automate even the most basic L1 tasks. Today, just 36% of organizations surveyed have AI agents running in production for a single use case.
"Adversaries are already operating at machine speed. Defenders mostly aren't," said Tim Leehealey, Co-Founder and VP of Corporate Strategy at Strike48. "The data shows security leaders know where they need to go. They just don't trust the road yet. Closing that gap is the most urgent capability question in cybersecurity right now."
The report identifies trust as the primary barrier to adoption. 52% of respondents said they don't trust AI agent outputs enough to let them act autonomously, and 64% flagged three or more distinct trust concerns at once, ranging from unintended actions to hallucinations to acting on incomplete data.
A second major finding: data visibility limitations are deepening the trust problem. 57% of security leaders don’t trust agents because they could act on incomplete data and 84% of security leaders said their current tools cannot access all their log data for investigations. An AI agent built on top of incomplete data infrastructure inherits every blind spot the infrastructure already has, which the report documents as a direct contributor to leader hesitation.
The urgency around agentic adoption was reinforced by an emergency strategy briefing from SANS Institute and the Cloud Security Alliance, called The AI Vulnerability Storm, warning that defensive teams who have not adopted AI agents face "a widening capability gap against AI-augmented adversaries, regardless of their existing technical skill." The briefing's first-priority recommendation was for security organizations to introduce AI agents to the cyber workforce.
Additional findings from the survey in the The State of Agentic Security report include:
- 46% are currently researching or evaluating agentic security solutions
- 60% of leaders identified alert triage and prioritization as a SOC task they would want to automate first
- 80% cite the cost of keeping log data hot, live, and searchable as painful or a budget concern
The report includes recommended actions for security teams looking to close the gap, including layering AI agents into existing infrastructure rather than ripping and replacing, ensuring agents have access to complete data across the security environment, and transitioning L1 analysts into agent management roles.
"Security teams don't have time to wait for the perfect agentic solution," Leehealey said. "The teams that start by layering agents into the stack they already have and giving them visibility to as much data as possible, will have a major advantage over AI-enabled adversaries."
The State of Agentic Security 2026 is available as a free download here: strike48.com/agentic-security-report
About Strike48
Strike48 is the agentic security operations platform that combines complete log visibility with AI agents that run investigations, automate detection engineering, and orchestrate response—at machine speed, 24/7. A product brand from Devo Technology, Strike48 is headquartered in Boston, USA. Learn more at strike48.com.
Media Contact Garrett Huddy garrett.huddy@strike48.com 614-804-7919
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