The Dawn of Agentic AI in the SOC

Now that six in ten security leaders view AI as a “game changer” across all security functions and 85% of security professionals report increased AI investment and usage in the past year, it’s clear that AI is no longer a fringe technology in security operations.

But the AI conversation has evolved recently as a new buzzword has taken over: agentic AI. Underlying the hype are real advancements that have the potential to transform security operations by adding autonomous, goal-oriented decision making to AI-powered SOCs. Gartner even named agentic AI one of the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025.  

Agentic AI is especially promising for security operations as a way to tackle persistent challenges such as alert fatigue, analyst burnout, and an ongoing talent shortage. Additionally, as increasingly automated attacks intensify the stakes for SOC teams, agentic AI will be a pivotal technology to counteract evolving threats through improved proactiveness and scalability. 

2 Key Use Cases for Agentic AI in the SOC 

1. Agentic AI in Phishing Response

Phishing continues to plague SOCs as one of the most common attack vectors for data breaches and ransomware. Agentic AI can elevate phishing response capabilities by streamlining triage, investigation, and containment once detections are flagged by external systems. 

Through seamless integrations with email security, identity management, threat intelligence, EDR, CMDB, and SIEM solutions, Torq’s Agentic AI can autonomously:

• Examine recipients, email content, links, attachments, IOC reputations, and related case and threat information to determine scope and impact, identifying users who received, opened, or interacted with an email. 
• Execute environment-wide sweeps for malicious payloads and correlate data to reveal compromised accounts or systems.
• Initiate containment steps such as quarantining emails, resetting credentials, terminating sessions with enforced MFA, and blocking malicious domains or IPs.  

2. Agentic AI in EDR Response

Experts predict that 20% of new malware strains will be AI-assisted by 2025. Agentic AI can bolster malware detection and response by orchestrating rapid analysis, scoping, containment, and eradication once suspicious activity is flagged by external platforms. 

Torq’s Agentic AI integrates with EDR, CMDB, SIEM, and threat intelligence tools to autonomously:

• Analyze file behavior (including hashes, signatures, and sandbox results), monitor endpoint resource usage, and detect suspicious persistence mechanisms or privilege escalations.
• Correlate anomalies across multiple endpoints to identify the scope of compromise, pinpointing infected hosts, associated IOCs, and potentially affected privileged accounts.
• Swiftly isolate infected endpoints, disable compromised accounts, and kill malicious processes. Malicious file hashes and IP addresses are then added to deny lists for continuous monitoring. Eradication actions can include removing malicious files, cleaning up affected systems, or re-imaging endpoints, ensuring a thorough remediation. 

Torq’s Multi-Agent System: Agentic AI in Action 

When you peel them back, many “AI SOC Agents” on the market are simply ChatGPT-style natural language chatbots. They may be capable of running steps and workflows but lack deep integrations and autonomous capabilities. 

In contrast, Torq’s Multi-Agent System is deeply integrated across the full security stack and able to take complex action and tackle multi-step tasks. At the helm is Socrates, Torq’s agentic AI SOC Analyst which can conduct fully autonomous case investigation, enrichment, and remediation from start to finish, as well as generating contextual recommendations. Alongside Socrates, Torq’s other AI agents provide AI-generated workflows, code, data transformations, case summaries, and more — helping SOC teams get more done, faster.

The Agentic AI ‘Wow Factor’ for Security Operations

“I believe the successful use of agentic AI in SOC operations shows up in practical outcomes. With Torq Agentic AI, the answer is ‘yes’ to questions such as: Are analysts happier? Are they sticking around? Do they have time to focus on more interesting and complex investigations? Are MTTM and MTTR lower? Torq Agentic AI extends and enhances our team so it can make better decisions more quickly — resulting in stronger security all around.”

– Mick Leach, Field CISO, Abnormal Security

• Boosting analyst engagement and retention: Rather than replacing human analysts, agentic AI can actually help make their day-to-day work in the SOC more rewarding and engaging by eliminating many of the “SOC analyst killers” that bog them down, such as alert fatigue, summarizing cases, and writing reports. This is crucial in a cybersecurity field that continues to deal with an ongoing talent shortage.
• Augmenting human expertise: For complex and high stakes cases that require human intervention, analysts can collaborate with agentic AI to make faster and better-informed decisions. This is thanks to agentic AI’s ability to correlate information from multiple tools, signals, and third-party threat intelligence to contextually enrich cases and provide deeper insights.
• Improving security posture: Through its ability to identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate malicious activity, agentic AI improves threat detection and response, enabling SOCs to proactively mitigate threats. Automated incident response and alert triage can reduce mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and mean time to containment (MTTC), minimizing the impact of security incidents.
• Enhancing operational efficiency and scalability: By handling Tier-1 and Tier-2 alerts and automating routine tasks, agentic AI frees up human analysts to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as threat hunting and vulnerability management. Agentic AI also enables SOCs to scale more efficiently, managing a higher workload without adding headcount.

Considerations for Building Trust in AI in the SOC

SOCs planning to deploy AI capabilities, including agentic AI, should take steps now to document and audit current processes, as it will be important to ensure that AI and automation is used to scale effective processes, rather than to compensate for ineffective ones. Security teams should also establish a method to quantify operational gains from an AI deployment. 

As with any new technology, AI in the SOC will require new skills and training for security teams, such as learning how to effectively collaborate with agentic AI. Any agentic AI solution deployed should be able to raise a flag when it is missing information or requires human validation. For example, if the AI’s threat analysis leads it to recommend quarantining a laptop but the user’s title is “CEO”, the system should have the intelligence and boundaries to flag that the decision is “above its pay grade” and then escalate the decision for human review and approval.

To combat the risk of AI hallucinations and build trust in AI, the system must be able to transparently explain why it made the decisions it made and how it came to the conclusions it did. This requires the AI to bolster its insights and recommendations with citations to original, forensic evidence.

AI or Die: Get the Manifesto

While agentic AI is still a relatively nascent technology, its potential to revolutionize security operations is undeniable. But the crowded AI SOC market makes careful selection essential. 

Get the AI or Die Manifesto to learn red flags that separate AI-washed vaporware from truly impactful AI for the SOC, as well as strategic considerations for effective adoption.