AI agents brought huge benefits to SOC teams drowning in alerts, data, and manual tasks. But the threat landscape hasn’t stopped evolving. Already, we’re beginning to see those benefits nullified. Organizations must adopt AI that acts, not reacts. They need agentic AI in the SOC.

From AI Agents to Agentic AI: More than Semantics

Although they sound similar, AI agents and agentic AI are two distinct layers of artificial intelligence.

AI agents are individual building blocks, designed to reason, plan, and act towards a specific goal either independently or in limited collaboration. Ultimately, they handle one task. They’re impressive but have narrow scopes.

Agentic AI is the overarching system that links AI agents together. It provides the framework, architecture, and tools that orchestrate, align, and facilitate collaboration between individual AI agents to achieve broader outcomes.

Let’s put this in simpler terms.

Imagine a heist crew. The core members might include a lockpicking expert, a con artist, a getaway driver, a lookout, and so on. The point is that they all have their specialties. On their own, they might be able to pull off limited, low-level robberies, but larger heists would be beyond their reach. They are your AI agents.

In this context, agentic AI is the mastermind behind it all. The person who plans, organizes, and, ultimately, enables the heist (from a darkened room, in a fancy chair, with a cat). And, crucially, when things go wrong in the moment, they’re the one who reroutes the plan and keeps things moving. Without them, the heist crew is just a ragtag bunch of bad guys. With them, it’s a crack team capable of stealing the crown jewels. What Roles Do AI Agents and Agentic AI Play in the SOC?

But let’s bring this back to security.

Traditional AI agents are already embedded in many SOCs. They triage alerts, enrich logs, grab threat intel, and perform incident response subtasks. They handle narrow, well-defined objectives, but are human-dependent, reactive, and are only “creative” within your pre-programmed limits.

In practice, this means that, for example, individual AI SOC agents can flag a suspicious login, but it won’t decide to investigate further unless specifically programmed to.

Agentic AI, however, can set goals, adapt, plan, and, crucially, act independently. In practice, that might mean that an agentic AI system could detect a lateral movement pattern, simulate the attack path, isolate affected systems, notify stakeholders, and begin prioritization without a human needing to look over, define, or direct its actions.

How is Agentic AI Changing SOC Workflows?

Ultimately, agentic AI brings about the benefit that AI has long promised security teams: analysts no longer have to do the work that machines are better suited to do.

With AI agents – although they’re useful – alerts still land in a queue. Analysts still have to open multiple tools, gather context, look up threat intel, verify indicators, and manually decide what to do next. The AI does one helpful task but can do no more. That leaves humans to fill in all the investigative gaps.

With Agentic AI, those gaps are filled long before the information lands in front of a real person. It generates an investigation plan, collects supporting evidence, and adjusts based on new evidence. Crucially, it doesn’t freeze when things get messy, like individual AI agents do.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Investigations start immediately: Agentic AI begins analysis the moment an alert fires, without waiting for a human.
• Response actions happen during the investigation: Containment steps are triggered as soon as malicious behavior is confirmed.
• Analysts receive outcomes, not starting points: The AI provides a full narrative of what happened and what’s already been done.
• Human effort shifts to higher-value work: Routine Tier 1 and 2 tasks are automated, so analysts focus on threat hunting and complex decision making.
• The SOC improves continuously: Analyst feedback refines future responses, reducing noise and accelerating action over time.

It’s worth mentioning here that not every agentic AI solution provider is reputable. In fact, Gartner estimates that only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.  Watch out for vendors trying to rebrand existing products as “agentic” - a tell-tale sign will be that they don’t change your workflows in the way outlined above.

Will Agentic AI Replace SOC Analysts?

This is a reasonable concern, but one that’s unfounded.

Agentic AI takes over the repetitive, high-volume tasks like alert triage, enrichment, and investigation steps. That’s all work machines can do faster and more efficiently than humans.

But SOC work is so much more than that. Strategy, threat hunting, and high-value decisions will always require human context and judgment. Put simply, agentic AI doesn’t replace analysts, it merely takes over the parts of the job that slow them down.

The AI SOC is Evolving – Don't Get Left Behind

The threat landscape is intensifying by the day. Analysts are stretched to breaking point.

We’ve evolved past manually sorting alerts, the way we evolved past relying on horses for travel. When better, more efficient ways to live and work become possible, we adopt them – because the alternative is falling behind. The same is true for security.

It’s normal to be suspicious of – or even a little scared by – evolving technology. In fact, it’s sensible. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore it entirely: progress will keep marching on, and only you can decide whether you march with it, or get left behind.

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Josh is a Content writer at Bora. He graduated with a degree in Journalism in 2021 and has a background in cybersecurity PR. He's written on a wide range of topics, from AI to Zero Trust, and is particularly interested in the impacts of cybersecurity on the wider economy.