Maidar Secure, in partnership with Strike48, the agentic security operations platform, has highlighted findings from The State of Agentic Security 2026: Breaking Through the Trust Barrier, a survey of 100 cybersecurity leaders examining where defenders actually stand on AI agents in the security operations centre (SOC).
The research reveals a 62-point gap between what security leaders believe should happen and what they are willing to deploy, with implications for how the cybersecurity industry adapts to AI-augmented adversaries.
The study found that while 84% of respondents agree AI agents should be handling level-1 SOC work, only 22% are ready to fully automate even the most basic L1 tasks. Today, just 36% of organisations surveyed have AI agents running in production for a single use case.
As part of its strategic partnership with Strike48, Maidar Secure is focused on helping organisations across Africa modernise their security operations through AI-driven SOC capabilities, enhanced visibility and intelligent automation designed to improve cyber resilience.
“Adversaries are already operating at machine speed. Defenders mostly aren’t,” said Strike48 vice president of corporate strategy and operations Tim Leehealey. “The data shows security leaders know where they need to go. They just don’t trust the road yet. Closing that gap is the most urgent capability question in cybersecurity right now.”
The report identifies trust as the primary barrier to adoption. Some 52% of respondents said they do not trust AI agent outputs enough to let them act autonomously, while 64% flagged three or more distinct trust concerns at once, ranging from unintended actions to hallucinations and acting on incomplete data.
Trust gap
A second major finding revealed that data visibility limitations are deepening the trust problem. Some 57% of security leaders said they do not trust agents because they could act on incomplete data, while 84% said their current tools cannot access all log data required for investigations.
An AI agent built on top of incomplete data infrastructure inherits every blind spot the infrastructure already has, which the report documents as a direct contributor to leader hesitation.
The urgency around agentic adoption was further reinforced by an emergency strategy briefing from the SANS Institute and the Cloud Security Alliance titled The AI Vulnerability Storm, warning that defensive teams who have not adopted AI agents face “a widening capability gap against AI-augmented adversaries, regardless of their existing technical skill”.
The briefing’s first-priority recommendation was for security organisations to introduce AI agents into the cyber workforce.
Additional findings from The State of Agentic Security 2026 report include:
- Forty-six percent are currently researching or evaluating agentic security solutions;
- Sixty percent of leaders identified alert triage and prioritisation as the SOC task they would automate first; and
- Eighty percent cited the cost of keeping log data hot, live, and searchable as painful or a budget concern.
The report includes recommended actions for security teams looking to close the gap, including layering AI agents into existing infrastructure rather than ripping and replacing systems, ensuring agents have access to complete data across the security environment, and transitioning L1 analysts into agent management roles.
Read: Maidar Secure, Strike48 bring agentic AI to the SOC
“Security teams don’t have time to wait for the perfect agentic solution,” Leehealey added. “The teams that start by layering agents into the stack they already have and giving them visibility to as much data as possible will have a major advantage over AI-enabled adversaries.”
The full State of Agentic Security 2026 report is available as a free download from Strike48.
About Maidar Secure
Maidar Secure delivers modern cybersecurity and managed security services designed to help organisations strengthen cyber resilience and improve operational visibility. Its offerings include SOC services, compliance, cloud security, data protection, endpoint security, application security and network security solutions tailored to modern enterprise environments.
About Strike48
Strike48 is the agentic security operations platform that combines complete log visibility with AI agents that run investigations, automate detection engineering and orchestrate response at machine speed, 24/7. A product brand from Devo Technology, Strike48 is headquartered in Boston, US. Learn more at Strike48.