State of Exposure Management report reveals gap between AI investment and operational confidence
Despite the saturation of AI in cybersecurity, these tools have yet to gain the operational trust necessary to move beyond data analysis and into automated action. According to the newly released 2026 State of Exposure Management Report from Seemplicity, 88% of enterprises have integrated AI into their security stacks, yet only 31% fully trust AI-sourced recommendations to influence prioritization decisions.
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“While confidence in AI agents is still developing, it is trending upward as security teams realize they can no longer manually process their way out of exponential data growth.” – Yoran Sirkis, CEO of Seemplicity
This disconnect suggests that while AI is being deployed at scale, its role remains limited by caution towards its decision-making authority. While more than half of all organizations report that the monthly influx of security findings frequently outpaces their capacity to resolve them, the lack of trust in automated decision-making has kept AI relegated to basic data aggregation. The result is a widening execution gap. Organizations are using AI to identify risks faster than ever, but they remain hesitant to authorize the technology to drive the actual remediation process, leaving a significant percentage of exposures unresolved in growing backlogs.
“There’s a massive surge happening in AI adoption across every cyber discipline as organizations struggle to keep up with AI-generated attacks and discoveries, but it stalls exactly where the action is needed most,” said Yoran Sirkis, CEO of Seemplicity. “As an industry, we are not closing the gap between findings and fixes fast enough, and while confidence in AI agents is still developing, it is trending upward as security teams realize they can no longer manually process their way out of exponential data growth.”
Key findings from the report include:
- Trust Gap: 88% of organizations use AI, but only 31% trust its recommendations.
- Effective Communication: 94% of leaders can translate security risks for non-technical stakeholders.
- Process Inconsistency: 43% of leaders admit their remediation processes are still “ad hoc.”
- The Ownership Struggle: 59% of security and engineering teams still negotiate who is responsible for each fix.
- Administrative Burden: 50% of security professionals spend more time on coordination than technical analysis.
The “Coordination Tax” Stalls Remediation
The report identifies a systemic “coordination tax” that is cannibalizing the time of highly skilled security professionals. With 59% of organizations relying on manual negotiations to assign remediation owners, identifying who is responsible for a fix has become a primary operational bottleneck. This administrative drag means that for half of the industry, the time spent coordinating logistics now equals or exceeds the time spent on actual risk analysis, effectively hitting an execution ceiling that discovery tools alone cannot break.
Bridging the Business-to-Technical Gap
Security leaders excel at communicating risk to business peers, yet that clarity has not yet translated into standardized operations. While 94% of respondents feel they can effectively explain progress in business terms, nearly half admit their actual remediation mechanics lack a standardized process. This suggests that while organizations have mastered the art of board-level translation, the lack of formalized exposure management workflows raises questions about the long-term accuracy and reliability of the data being shared with stakeholders.
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