Situatie
Artificial intelligence is becoming one of the most important technologies in cybersecurity. Security teams are using AI to analyze alerts, detect suspicious behavior and investigate incidents, while attackers are increasingly experimenting with AI to automate parts of their operations.
The result is a rapidly changing security landscape where both defenders and attackers can potentially move faster than before. Traditional security systems were designed around applications, servers, networks and users. AI introduces another layer. Companies are now deploying AI assistants and autonomous agents that can access documents, applications, APIs and internal systems. That creates new opportunities, but it also creates new security risks.
A 2026 Darktrace study found that 92% of surveyed security professionals were concerned about the impact of AI agents across the workforce.
Attackers Can Automate More Tasks
Cybercriminals have always relied on automation. AI can make some processes more flexible. Instead of using a fixed script for every situation, an AI-powered system can potentially analyze information, adapt its next step and generate new content based on what it encounters.
This does not mean that AI can magically hack any computer. Modern systems still have authentication mechanisms, security controls and other barriers. However, automation can lower the amount of manual work required for certain types of attacks.
Defenders Are Using AI Too. The story is not entirely negative. Security teams are also using AI to process enormous amounts of information. A modern security operation can generate thousands or millions of events. Human analysts cannot investigate every alert manually.
AI can help prioritize suspicious activity, summarize incidents and identify relationships between events that might otherwise be missed. The European Commission has also highlighted both the opportunities and risks of advanced AI in cybersecurity as part of its 2026 cybersecurity strategy.
Unlike traditional chatbots, agents can be designed to perform multiple steps, interact with tools and continue working toward a goal.That makes them potentially useful for security operations. For example, an agent could analyze an alert, collect additional information, compare activity with historical data and prepare a report for a security analyst.
But giving an AI system access to real infrastructure also introduces serious risks. Why Human Oversight Still Matters. AI systems can make mistakes. An automated security system that incorrectly identifies legitimate activity as malicious could disrupt an important business process. The opposite problem can be even worse: failing to recognize a genuine attack.
For this reason, organizations need appropriate permissions, monitoring and human oversight when deploying AI agents. Recent research has also emphasized that securing autonomous AI requires looking beyond individual actions and considering the entire sequence of actions performed by an agent.
AI will probably become a standard component of cybersecurity rather than a separate technology.Security professionals will increasingly need to understand both traditional security concepts and AI-specific risks. The organizations that benefit most will likely be those that use AI to improve human decision-making rather than simply giving autonomous systems unlimited access.
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