AI
Agentic AI in Cybersecurity: Proactive, Intelligent, and Adaptive
Agentic AI doesn’t just analyze, it acts. With ransomware attacks up 126% and AI-enabled threats increasing 47% from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, the scale and speed of modern cyberattacks have overwhelmed human-only defenses. Agentic AI is emerging as a critical capability to reduce enterprise risk, respond faster than human teams alone, and stay ahead of increasingly automated, AI-enabled adversaries.
To understand the impact agentic AI is having on enterprise cybersecurity, it’s important to clarify what it is, how it builds on large language model (LLM) capabilities, what makes it truly agentic, and where it’s being applied in cybersecurity.
What is Agentic AI
Agentic AI refers to autonomous artificial intelligence systems that can perceive, plan, and act independently to achieve complex goals. Unlike traditional automation, which follows static scripts, agentic AI uses LLM-powered reasoning to handle ambiguity, make decisions, and adjust strategies in real time. Advantages of Agentic AI systems:
- Autonomous decision-making capabilities
- Persistent memory to learn from experiences
- Strategic reasoning to adapt to new situations
- Tool orchestration to execute multi-step tasks
From LLMs to Agentic AI
LLMs play a key role in powering the reasoning layer of agentic AI. On their own, LLMs are stateless and reactive, great at understanding and generating language, but limited to responding to a single prompt without memory or long-term goals. They’re useful for tasks such as:
- Answering questions like “What is a CVE?”
- Generating scripts on request
- Listing steps to respond to an alert
When integrated into agent architectures with persistent memory, tool access, and feedback loops, LLMs become the reasoning engine for autonomous systems. Agentic AI can set objectives, make decisions, and interact with real-world systems to achieve desired outcomes, capabilities that are especially critical in cybersecurity, where adaptability and real-time responses are essential.
Examples of agentic behavior in cybersecurity include:
- Autonomous threat investigations triggered by suspicious activity
- Memory-informed response strategies that adjust based on previous incident outcomes
- Strategic adaptation, such as changing tactics when a technique is blocked
- Tool orchestration, including running scans, blocking IPs, and triggering escalations via APIs
In this context, LLMs provide the reasoning layer, while the broader agentic AI system handles planning, execution, and integration with operational environments.
What Makes AI Truly Agentic and How Agentic AI Works
Agentic AI systems are characterized by four key capabilities that enable autonomous, intelligent operations:
- Strategic Planning and Reasoning
Breaks down complex goals into logical, multi-step plans.
Example: The agent sees a login form, infers that it might be vulnerable to SQL injection, and forms a multi-step plan to test, confirm, and exploit it. - State-Aware Behavior and Adaptation
Remembers what worked or failed within a session or scope and adapts strategies based on these memories.
Example: If one exploit fails, the agent remembers that outcome, discards the failed approach, and tries a different attack vector instead of repeating the same action. - Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
Interprets human instructions, system outputs, and unstructured data to take effective action.
Example: Converting analyst notes into structured tasks. - Autonomous Tool Use
Selects and controls tools (e.g., scanners, APIs, scripts) to gather information or take action.
Example: Chooses to use Nmap to scan for open ports, hashcat to crack a password, and curl to send a malicious payload.
Agentic AI is more than automation; it’s autonomous problem-solving. The power of Agentic AI systems comes from their ability to reason, plan, use tools, and learn from their mistakes (the ReAct loop). This enables them to tackle complex, multi-step attack chains with a resilience and adaptability that simple scripts cannot match. Here’s how it works in practice:
- Reason: Uses its LLM to analyze context, determine intent, and break down goals like “triage critical vulnerabilities” or “identify lateral movement paths” into executable steps.
- Act: Autonomously runs tools (e.g., port scanners, web crawlers, custom scripts) through APIs—executing tasks like testing controls or simulating attacks. This isn’t just running a script; it’s choosing the right script with the right parameters.
- Observe: Collects and interprets data the results of its action drawing on sources such as asset inventories, logs, threat intelligence, configurations, and vulnerability scanners. This isn’t a passive step; it involves actively gathering raw data, error messages, or successful responses from the tools it executes to understand the outcomes and the state of the target environment.
This combination of memory, planning, and autonomous action allows agentic AI to operate continuously and effectively in complex cybersecurity environments, far beyond traditional automation. As a result, it’s driving improvements in how enterprise security teams detect, respond to, and reduce risk.
Agentic AI In Action: Cybersecurity Use Cases
Agentic AI systems develop strategies and autonomously execute complex tasks by leveraging underlying LLMs that have been trained on vast amounts of data. The agentic system orchestrates the LLM to analyze new information and get things done. Today, agentic AI is driving innovation across several key areas in cybersecurity:
- Penetration testing: Agents act as attackers across networks, applications, and cloud systems. They chain exploits, adapt their strategies based on defenses encountered, and map out real-world attack paths, surfacing risks that static scanners miss, while scaling testing to cover more of the enterprise attack surface.
- Vulnerability Triage: Agents prioritize and validate exploitable vulnerabilities from scan results, improving signal from scanners and reducing analyst workload. When new findings are detected, agents use proof-based validation to verify exploitable risks, recommend actions, and escalate prioritized risks.
- Threat Detection & Investigation: Agents monitor logs and telemetry, evaluate alerts, and investigate anomalies. They adapt detection tactics based on outcomes and can take automated steps, such as initiating scanning or flagging misconfigurations, before human intervention is needed.
- Multi-Agent Collaboration: Specialized agents (e.g., for reconnaissance, credential abuse, privilege escalation, or post-exploitation) coordinate to execute complex, multi-phase assessments across the attack surface with minimal human oversight.
Example in action: A penetration testing agent identifies high-value targets, plans a scoped attack chain, and runs safe, controlled exploits to validate weaknesses. It adapts when defenses block a technique and produces an evidence-backed report, all while operating under established governance and oversight.
Human-Agent Teaming and Guardrails: Managing Risks in Agentic AI
While agentic AI offers new capabilities for enterprise security teams, its deployment introduces new risks. One concern is that excessive reliance on autonomous agents may reduce human oversight, potentially impacting the quality of high-stakes decision-making where nuanced judgment is critical.
To mitigate this risk, maintaining human-in-the-loop involvement can ensure humans retain strategic oversight over autonomous actions. Additionally, implementing granular operational guardrails within agentic AI systems can help control behavior and limit unintended consequences. For example, agent activity can be restricted to explicitly defined asset scopes, with limits on the types of actions the agent can take, and with complex or unusual findings flagged for human review.
As AI continues to accelerate software development and expand the attack surface, these emerging risks underscore the need to embed security expertise directly into agentic AI systems. Agentic AI can handle the scale while humans provide strategic oversight.
Putting Agentic AI to Work in Cybersecurity
For CISOs and security leaders, agentic AI offers a path from reactive defense to autonomous
operations and problem-solving. It doesn’t just explain what to do, it does it and adapts based on outcomes. Agentic AI systems can transform previously manual, point-in-time workflows into continuous, adaptive processes to strengthen cybersecurity defenses and optimize operations.
Agentic AI FAQ
What is an agentic AI system?
An agentic AI system is an autonomous software system that can pursue goals through reasoning, planning, tool use, and adaptation without requiring human input at each step. It typically combines a large language model (LLM) with other components such as memory, tool access, and execution control. This enables it to break down high-level goals, act in the real world, observe outcomes, and refine its strategy over time—making it especially powerful in dynamic environments like cybersecurity.
How is agentic AI different from traditional automation?
Traditional automation follows pre-scripted workflows and cannot handle novel or ambiguous situations. Agentic AI systems use reasoning and memory to adapt plans in real-time, dynamically selecting tools, adjusting based on outcomes, and operating in unpredictable environments without step-by-step instructions
What is machine learning, and its role in agentic AI?
Machine learning (ML) enables systems to learn from data and improve over time without being explicitly programmed for every scenario. In agentic AI, ML helps agents interpret data, recognize patterns, and make decisions — such as prioritizing risks, predicting likely attack paths, or adjusting tactics based on previous outcomes. It provides the underlying intelligence that allows agents to continuously adapt and optimize their actions in real-world environments.
What’s the difference between agentic AI and generative AI?
Agentic AI builds goal-driven systems that plan, act, and use tools autonomously, with memory, feedback, and safety rules. Generative AI focuses on delivering content (e.g., text, images, or code) in response to prompts. Agentic AI systems use generative models as components, but add planners, execution, persistence, and real-world control for continuous tasks and human oversight.
What are LLMs and their role in agentic AI?
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a type of generative AI, deep learning models trained on vast text and code data to generate human-like language. Within agentic AI systems, LLMs provide core reasoning and language-understanding capabilities. They parse instructions, draft plans, generate tool commands, summarize evidence, and provide contextual knowledge to support autonomous decision-making and action.
What does “human-in-the-loop” mean in agentic AI?
“Human-in-the-loop” refers to a hybrid model where agentic AI operates autonomously for many tasks—but human experts are involved in reviewing, validating, and escalating findings that are complex, ambiguous, or beyond the AI’s reliable scope. The AI generates alerts, proof-of-exploitability, and decision suggestions; humans provide strategic oversight, catch nuances, and ensure that the output meets high standards for accuracy and relevance.