Nearly half rank AI agents operating with excessive‚ compromised‚ or unintended access as the greatest threat to their organizations, while behavioral context and business-risk translation are key gaps
News Summary
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48% of security leaders rank AI agents with excessive, compromised, or unintended access as the top threat to their organizations.
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Organizations are expanding AI agent monitoring, but behavioral context, correlation, and cross-system visibility remain key gaps.
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Security and finance largely agree on cyber risk, yet 55% of security leaders have delayed or scaled back initiatives because they could not frame the risk in financial terms their CFO would accept.
Exabeam, the leader in behavior intelligence for the agentic enterprise, released new research showing that AI agents have become a new insider risk priority for enterprise security teams. Nearly half (48%) of security leaders surveyed rank AI agents operating with excessive, compromised, or unintended access as the greatest threat to their organization, ahead of external threat actors, compromised insiders, and malicious insiders. The findings also show organizations are expanding AI agent monitoring but continue to face challenges understanding their behavior across systems and business context.
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Exabeam commissioned Sapio Research to survey 600 security and finance decision-makers across seven countries for its latest report, The Agentic Insider: From Monitoring to Understanding. In this research, AI agents are goal-driven, autonomous systems that can access enterprise resources and take actions with limited human intervention — not conversational chatbots.
The findings show that as AI agents become trusted participants in enterprise operations, organizations are investing in multiple approaches to monitoring their activity. At the same time, security leaders identify behavioral context and correlation as the leading limitations of current monitoring approaches, while cross-system visibility remains a significant gap. “Organizations are making meaningful progress in monitoring AI agents, but monitoring activity isn’t the same as understanding behavior,” said Steve Wilson, Chief AI and Product Officer at Exabeam. “AI agents operate with legitimate access and interact across multiple systems, making individual actions appear routine. Security teams need the context to connect those actions over time so they can distinguish expected automation from misuse, compromise, or unintended behavior.”
AI Agent Access Is Reshaping Insider Risk
AI agents do not need malicious intent to create risk, and the research shows that the rapid adoption of AI agents is changing how organizations think about insider risk.
Key findings include:
- 48% of security leaders rank AI agents operating with excessive, compromised, or unintended access as the greatest threat to their organization today, ahead of external threat actors (28%), compromised insiders (12%), and malicious insiders (12%).
- Access to sensitive data, actions beyond intended permissions, investigation complexity, and limited visibility into AI agent behavior rank among the top concerns for security and finance leaders.
Organizations Are Expanding AI Agent Monitoring
Security leaders report using a variety of approaches to monitor AI agents:
- 60% use dedicated AI security or governance tooling.
- 56% extend existing SIEM, detection, or monitoring platforms.
- 56% use behavioral monitoring and baselining.
- 29% continue to rely on manual review.
Despite those investments, 27% identify limited behavioral context and correlation as the biggest limitation of their current monitoring approach, while poor visibility across environments, alert prioritization, and manual processes also remain significant challenges.
Security and Finance Agree on Risk, but Investment Requires a Strong Business Case
The report also finds strong alignment between security and finance leaders. Ninety-three percent say the two functions are aligned on cybersecurity risk tolerance, and 81% of security leaders say their CFO understands the cybersecurity risks they are working to mitigate.
That alignment does not always translate into investment: 55% of security leaders report delaying or scaling back a security initiative because they could not frame the risk in financial terms that their CFO would accept.
“CFOs rarely question whether a cybersecurity risk is real,” said Mike Byron, Chief Financial Officer at Exabeam. “The challenge is understanding how a proposed investment reduces that risk in measurable business terms. When security teams connect technical outcomes to business impact, investment decisions become much easier.”
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