The conversation about AI in security has focused on governance and access control: what tools to block, how to structure policy, and who owns the mandate. When creating our AI Heading into 2026 report, we discovered there’s a second urgent challenge that’s happening within the security team.
When security executives were asked to rate their priorities heading into 2026 on a scale of 1–5, “Using AI on the Security Team” scored a 4.57, and “Keep Pace With AI-Enabled Threat Actors” earned a 4.25 from security leaders. Both priorities point to the same reality: AI is something security teams need to master.
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Why AI-Powered Cyberattacks Are Overwhelming Traditional Security Defenses
AI is only rarely used to create entirely novel attack types. The more pressing issue for security leaders is the dramatic increase in believable, sophisticated attacks. AI enables smarter, more realistic social engineering, and it lowers the cost and effort required for bad actors to do it at scale.
There isn’t an easy way to educate employees fast enough to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. The answer isn’t necessarily to double down on security awareness training. It’s to make the security team itself faster and more capable. Security teams can get better at parsing log data, smarter at filtering false positives, and more automated in detect-and-respond workflows.
READ MORE: The CISO’s Expanding AI Mandate: Leading Governance in 2026
How CISOs Are Using AI to Automate Security Operations in 2026
With AI now embedded into dev stacks and deeply integrated into the cloud platforms security teams already use, automation at scale is becoming a practical reality. The most effective deployments combine agentic AI with deterministic SOAR playbooks.
CISOs report successful automation efforts that are helping teams manage with flat headcount budgets, and, in some cases, allowing reallocation of security operations (SecOps) spend. Security leaders are still cautious about overstating ROI. Nobody truly knows what generative AI inference will cost, and the most accurate, efficient AI models are by far the most expensive. CISOs building SecOps automation strategies today must account for this in their total cost of ownership (TCO) models.
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How Security Teams Are Using AI to Handle Data Overload
Before full SecOps automation, there’s a more immediate opportunity that the CISO community has already embraced. GenAI is proving useful for processing the volume of structured and unstructured data security teams handle daily. For instance, genAI is useful for tasks such as identifying risk themes in vendor questionnaires, standardizing responses to third-party inquiries, producing initial report drafts, and generating asset inventories from environment scans.
With flat budgets and expanding scope, AI is enabling teams to handle more without adding headcount. Teams getting the most value treat AI output as a starting point, not a final answer.
READ MORE: AI Agents Are Creating an Identity Security Crisis in 2026
Why AI Adoption Is Creating a Security Team Workforce Divide in 2026
AI is not improving performance evenly across security teams. Top-quartile employees are embracing it, using AI to offload tedious work and layering in their own judgment and producing output that’s faster and better, which makes strong performers stand out even more.
The challenge lies with two other cohorts the report identifies: AI skeptics who are unwilling to adapt and are starting to fall behind, and AI dependents who lean so heavily on AI that they fail to add the human judgment that makes AI output valuable. CISOs finding success here are actively coaching their teams through the transition.
How CISOs Can Build AI-Ready Security Teams in 2026
The arms race with AI-enabled threat actors won’t be won through policy alone. It requires security teams that are faster, more automated, and more capable. Using AI on the security team is the top priority for 2026. The teams that move deliberately now will be better positioned than those waiting to see how AI goes.
IANS latest report: AI Heading into 2026 provides access to objective, data-driven insights from IANS community polls and cross-industry CISOs to see how today’s security leaders are approaching AI in practice. This report reveals the evolving standards shaping AI policy and governance, and how CISOs are tightening access while building business-aligned oversight. Learn more about how security leaders are redefining AI vendor strategy, and the top AI-driven priorities commanding executive focus in 2026.
Download AI Heading into 2026 and access objective, data-driven insights from IANS community polls and hard-won lessons from CISOs who are actively implementing AI in their organizations and learn more about how security leaders are approaching SecOps automation, managing the workforce impact of AI, and keeping pace with AI-enabled threat actors.
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