CISOs are hopeful that bringing AI-driven automation to security operations workflows can help tip the scales towards defenders, said Franck Vervial, Regional CISO, APAC and MENA, L’Oreal. “In an era of agentic AI-driven attacks, such automation is not optional — it is essential for timely and effective response,” he said.
As CISOs look for automated, agile defenses that scale beyond their existing security operations center (SOC) capacity, we’ve introduced our vision of an agentic SOC to help address the biggest security operations bottlenecks. By offering agent-supported defense capabilities built on optimizing data pipelines, automating alert triage, investigation, and response, the agentic SOC can streamline detection engineering workflows to address coverage gaps and create new threat-led detections.
As we build out that vision, we have also begun to discuss our approach to securing AI agents. We detailed in our early June newsletter Google’s strategy for securing AI agents, covering agent security challenges and our continued work toward ensuring AI agents are beneficial and secured by default. Agentic AI governance should follow the same guardrails for traditional AI systems, while implementing further measures for evolving security, privacy, and compliance risks, as appropriate.
We also discussed with CISO event attendees their concerns on how AI can help boost defenders and enable better business outcomes with improvements to threat intelligence, detection engineering, and critical thinking. While it’s still early days for using AI to gain even more from threat intelligence, it’s clear that defenders see great potential that’s already starting to be realized.
Security leaders said they are looking for deeper, more holistic views of incidents, for guidance on focus points, and for actionable steps to use AI for threat landscape analysis. In April, we shared our recent successes using AI to boost threat hunting, improve security validations, and deliver smarter red team analysis.
Naturally, CISOs want to learn more about how AI can improve detection engineering, particularly for behavioral patterns. So far, they’ve found that the quickest wins can come from reducing the time spent on investigations and navigating multiple portals, freeing up valuable personnel to focus on problems that need critical thinking skills. We’ve seen some advancements towards that future from the use of our Big Sleep agent to improve security outcomes.
