At DXC Technology, global CISO , global cybersecurity services lead at Accenture, wanted to retrain his team for agentic AI, the first thing he did was immerse himself in the technology. He signed up for an Anthropic boot camp, took courses to familiarize himself with the technology, then sent members of his team to take bootcamp classes as well.
, will be an essential part of that transformation.
“Every security leader needs to start planning for an agentic future because our adversaries will be operating at machine speed and human-based processes, limited by our own biology, will not be able to scale to the needs of the future,” Baker tells CSO.
White adds, “The big risk is not adapting fast enough. Lots of CISOs are waiting until the perfect solution comes along or the platform that does everything. That itself introduces risk in the organization. Inaction is a risk.”
, Baker adds.
“The challenge of re-disciplining security teams and the executives that run those teams is highly dependent on their ability to lean into what the business needs, to become business enablers by embracing AI, and all that it has to offer,” he notes. “The bigger reskilling is security’s ability to run at the speed of business and enable the business to transform, leveraging AI in a safe and secure manner.”
Making the most of agentic AI for cybersecurity is as much a mindset change as it is a technological one, White adds.
“You have to articulate as a leader how things are going to change, and rewire the mindset to the fact that you don’t have to do everything yourself,” he explains. “The majority of execution is going to be done agentically, roles move into defining outcomes, designing workflows, being able to articulate intent through natural language, and having a bit of judgment around the outcomes.”
Respect resistance but work to overcome it
As with any technology shift, resistance to change needs to be addressed, particularly with a technology that : “What does emerge are genuinely new specializations: AI security (protecting AI systems from attacks), AI safety (ensuring that agents behave reliably and within boundaries), and AI governance.”
White says that at Virgin Atlantic “there was some nervousness to begin with; people think their roles will get taken by AI and that’s not the case.” That junior staffer who went off to experiment with the Torq tool came back and announced he wanted to change roles and become an automation workflow specialist. “It shows how quickly someone’s mindset can change,” White says.
“There is always somewhat of a resistance around change,” says DXC’s Baker. “We had to go through a growing process and a training process. But in a short amount of time people on the team have that ‘aha’ moment. We have been able to reskill our humans to different value-add tasks. We’re able to do amazing things with humans in terms of redeploying them; it’s almost like supercharging their careers.”
Get hands on and intentional
It’s critical that CISOs carve out time for . “You have to appreciate that this is an organizational change as much as a technology change,” says White.
Agentic AI will have an impact on “the way we design teams, the way we manage people, the way that roles evolve,” he says. The traditional career ladder of moving up the tiers no longer applies when entry-level roles are agentic. “New people coming to security are going to have to take a different route,” he notes.
White adds that traditional security teams have been divided into disciplines and silos, but “those roles now start to move around, merge, and become more of a holistic capability than a siloed one.”
Foster skills that optimize human-AI collaboration
The introduction of agentic systems will necessarily transform cyber’s skillset.
Josh Taylor, lead cybersecurity analyst at Fortra, says, “The SOC analyst’s job has always been about processing signals, triaging alerts, correlating events, escalation. Agentic AI doesn’t eliminate that work; it will relocate an analyst from inside the process to above it. The fundamental reskilling challenge won’t be as technical; it will be cognitive.”
He adds, “When an agent triages 200 alerts and presents five for human review, the analyst needs to assess whether the agent’s reasoning was sound. CISOs should invest in training that builds ‘model intuition,’ the ability to recognize when an agent’s output feels right but is structurally wrong.”
CISOs should also emphasize training that teaches analysts to set policies and define constraints on what agents are allowed or not allowed to do, such as block production traffic or send external communication, Taylor says. “SOC teams need to build decision boundaries the same way they build incident response playbooks.”
White adds, “The beauty of agentic AI is that all you need is a well-articulated statement of what you’re trying to achieve, and the agent will do the rest for you. This type of intent-driven, automated, AI-based engineering is available now.”
But humans need to evaluate whether the new workflow or process achieved the desired goal, deliver the value that was expected, and they need to understand how to go back to the agent, refine the prompts and achieve a more favorable outcome, he says.
Reimagine your operating model
With 120,000 end users, Baker understood that his security teams were buried in alerts, data, and telemetry. Today, his tier 1 and tier 2 SOC analyst roles are agentic, but the SOC is only the beginning. His roadmap includes agentic AI playing a role in vulnerability management, penetration testing, patching, and other security functions.
White’s roadmap takes a similar path. “I would imagine that we will be leveraging AI more and more.” His agentic priority list includes vulnerability management, pen testing, patching, and compliance.
White says the benefits of an agentic SOC extend beyond technology to the human side of security. “The best leaders will be ones who have evolved the target operating model. In doing so, it’s going to make you have a happier workforce. Your SOC is going to look like a calm place, not chaos with alerts going everywhere.”
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