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While over 20 vendors announced agentic AI-based security agents, apps and platforms at RSAC 2025, the most insightful news from the conference is a rare, encouraging trend for security leaders. For the first time in three years, overall cybersecurity effectiveness has improved.
Scale Venture Partners (SVP) recently released the 2025 Cybersecurity Perspectives Report, which shared that the average effectiveness of cybersecurity protections improved for the first time in three years, increasing to 61% efficacy this year from 48% in 2023. According to the report, “70% of security leaders were most protected against general phishing attacks, with only 28% of firms reporting compromise.”
SVP also found that 77% of CISOs believe protecting AI/ML models and data pipelines is a priority to improve their security posture by 2025, up from 55% last year. Notably, given the influx of new agentic AI solutions announced at RSAC, 75% of firms expressed interest in leveraging AI to automate SOC investigations using AI agents to triage large volumes of security alerts to prevent security incidents.
Source: Scale Venture Partners, Cybersecurity Perspectives 2025 report.
SVP’s rise in efficacy numbers isn’t accidental; they result from CISOs and their teams adopting automation at scale while successfully consolidating their platforms and reducing gaps attackers had walked through in the past.
“If you don’t have complete visibility, the attackers are going to go through the cracks between products,” Etay Maor, senior director of security strategy at Cato Networks, told VentureBeat during RSAC 2025. “We designed our platform to eliminate those blind spots—bringing security and networking together so nothing escapes our eyes.”
Agentic AI is moving fast beyond minimum viable product to platform DNA
Maor’s perspective explains why a new definition of what a minimum viable product is needed for agentic AI in cybersecurity. RSAC 2025 revealed how mature agentic AI is becoming. There’s a group of vendors using agentic AI as a code-based adhesive to unify code bases and apps together, and then there are the ones who have been at this for years, and agentic AI is core to their code base and architecture.
Cybersecurity providers in this latter group, where agentic AI is core to their platform and, in many cases, continue to double-down their R&D spend on excelling at agentic AI. This includes Cato Networks’ SASE Cloud Platform, Cisco AI Defense, CrowdStrike’s Falcon single agent architecture, Darktrace’s Cyber AI Loop, Elastic’s Elastic AI Assistant, Microsoft’s Security Copilot and Defender XDR Suite, Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM, SentinelOne’s Singularity Platform and Vectra AI’s Cognito Platform.
Organizations that are relying on integrated AI-driven detection with automated containment are reducing dwell times by over 40%. They’re also nearly twice as likely to neutralize phishing-based intrusions before lateral movem …