Human Experts Will Cover 4 Key Roles as AI Transforms Offensive Security – Cybersecurity Insiders

Human Experts Will Cover 4 Key Roles as AI Transforms Offensive Security  Cybersecurity Insiders

Only one-third of attack surfaces are pentested on average; experts must set AI guardrails, uncover logic flaws and prioritize risk first. AI has made finding vulnerabilities the easy part of offensive security. The hard part is knowing which vulnerabilities to prioritize first. With AI agents, security teams are testing at a scale no humans can match. They run continuously, probe every change, generate their own payloads, and chain small weaknesses into real attack paths. The result is often more vulnerabilities than organizations can sort through. Meanwhile, adversaries are using AI to find and exploit weaknesses faster and organizations are pentesting only about one-third of their attack surface on average, according to research Synack commissioned with Omdia.

The answer is a combination of security experts and agentic AI to efficiently move from validated findings to prioritized risk. Someone has to decide what is real, what is reachable, and what to fix first, and security teams say as much. Our research confirms this is the preferred approach: 64% of organizations name agent-led testing with human oversight as their ideal operating model, and 79% of security leaders won’t act on AI-generated findings alone. At a high level, AI contributes breadth, speed, and endurance in security testing. Give an agent a task, a toolkit, and the right guardrails, and it covers ground no team