What separates the SOCs getting results from their AI strategies from those that don’t begins with CISOs who take ownership of AI initiatives and anticipate roadblocks early, systematically demolishing legacy walls that get in the way.The disconnect between AI’s promise and delivery dominated discussions at Forrester’s 2025 Security & Risk Summit last week. “We have a chaos agent of our own today,” said Allie Mellen, a principal analyst, during her keynote. “And that chaos agent is — you guessed it — generative AI.” Her keynote focused on the fact that many organizations and their cybersecurity teams are trapped behind self-imposed barriers that limit their potential.Closing the gap between agentic AI winners and losers The gap between AI winners and losers in cybersecurity isn’t about technology. It’s about organizational readiness.While leading organizations, including Carvana, City of Las Vegas, Copperbelt Energy Corporation Plc, Inductive Automation, Salesforce, and many others, capture efficiency gains, most enterprises remain trapped behind barriers that have built up over decades. With adversaries achieving a breakout in as little as 51 seconds according to CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report, and 80% of security teams preferring GenAI integrated into a broader security platform, dismantling legacy walls isn’t just strategic, it’s existential. More than 70% of enterprises experienced at least one AI-related breach in the past year alone, with generative models now the primary target, according to recent SANS Institute findings.The latest industry data presents a troubling paradox, however. Carnegie Mellon’s AgentCompany benchmark shows that AI agents fail 70 to 90% of the time on complex enterprise tasks. Salesforce’s research confirms that its internal agent failure rate exceeds 90% when security guardrails are applied. Yet 79% of executives report meaningful productivity gains from deployed AI agents. The resolution lies not in perfecting AI, but in removing the organizational walls that prevent its effective deployment.”The legacy SOC, as we know it, can’t compete. It’s turned into a modern-day firefighter,” warned CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz during his keynote at Fal.Con 2025. “The world is entering an arms race for AI superiority as adversaries weaponize AI to accelerate attacks. In the AI era, security comes down to three things: the quality of your data, the speed of your response, and the precision of your enforcement.”Enterprise SOCs average 83 security tools across 29 different vendors, each generating isolated data streams that defy easy integration to the latest generation of AI systems. System fragmentation and lack of integration represent AI’s greatest vulnerability, and organizations’ most fixable problem.The m …
