The Dawn of the Agentic SOC: Reimagining Cybersecurity for the AI Era

At Fal.Con 2025, I had the privilege of addressing over 8,000 cybersecurity professionals about something that's on my mind - and should be on all of ours: how do we fundamentally reimagine security for the age of AI?

We're living through the fourth industrial revolution. The first brought us steam power, the second electricity, and the third the digital age we all know and love. Now we're in the fourth industrial revolution, the age of AI, and it's transforming every aspect of our lives, including how we think about cybersecurity.

The AI Arms Race is Real

Here's the reality: AI is a double-edged sword. While we all have our "ChatGPT moments" and marvel at what these technologies enable, adversaries have these same moments. Just weeks ago, our team discovered malware that, once on a system, would prompt various GPTs for reconnaissance information, building unique PowerShell scripts tailored to each specific environment. Think about that: each system was being exploited in a completely customized way, in real time.

This isn't just making attackers more sophisticated; it's multiplying them. There are more people who can execute high-level attacks today than there were just two years ago, thanks to AI democratizing destruction. The old model simply can't keep up.

From Firefighting to Autonomous Defense

The legacy SOC is trying to fight a 21st-century war with 20th-century weapons. Security teams have become modern-day firefighters, constantly responding to the next alert, overwhelmed by data volume, and struggling to keep pace as attack timelines compress from weeks to days to hours to minutes - and now seconds.

That's why we need to reimagine the SOC entirely. Not build a better dashboard, but deliver the agentic SOC powered by intelligent agents that don't just assist - they reason, decide, act, and recursively learn across domains.

From Operator to Orchestrator

The fundamental shift we're seeing is moving security professionals from operators to orchestrators. Today, we have one analyst working on one threat in a direct, one-to-one relationship. But where we're heading is one analyst managing many agents, just like how autonomous vehicles changed the transportation model from one driver per car to one remote operator managing an entire fleet.

The agents are going to do the work. The humans are elevated into a role where they're controlling a fleet of agents, letting the agents handle the heavy lifting while they focus on strategy, oversight, and decision-making. This changes everything about speed and flexibility in security operations.

Introducing the Agentic Security Workforce

At Fal.Con, we announced seven new AI agents within our Charlotte framework: exposure prioritization, malware analysis, hunting, search, correlation rules, data transformation, and workflow generation agents. These aren't just tools; they're digital workers that can dramatically accelerate triage, write reports, analyze malware, and understand incidents on your behalf.

But here's what I'm most excited about: Charlotte AI AgentWorks. We're giving our customers the ability to build their own agents. Because a platform isn't just something you use - it's something you build on.

The Data Moat That Changes Everything

What makes our approach different? Data. We've become the "Reddit of security" with trillions of platform telemetry events, over a decade of annotated threats from our Falcon Complete MDR operations, cutting-edge threat intelligence, and insights from being at the tip of the spear on the battleground of major breaches. All of this labeled, curated data feeds into training our AI agents. Our platform brings it all together in one place. Without this foundation, it's nearly impossible to catch up.

Protecting the Protectors: Security for AI

While we're talking about "AI for security" - how we're using AI to revolutionize cybersecurity - we also need "security for AI": security to protect and govern the world's AI adoption.

AI agents look remarkably similar to humans. They have identities, workflows, access to resources and data. Some companies are even giving AI agents employee numbers. These agents operate like superhumans, processing vast amounts of data at incomprehensible speeds.

That's why we agreed to acquire Pangea, a leader in protecting AI agents across the entire lifecycle, from development to production. Our goal is ambitious: we want to protect every AI agent in the world. Just as we pioneered EDR, MDR, and CDR, we're now pioneering what comes next: introducing AIDR: AI Detection and Response.

The Road to Full Autonomy