40% of Security Teams Use AI Daily, Report Finds
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- Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 report, drawn from a survey of 250+ cybersecurity professionals, found 40% of teams use AI daily, 56% are testing it, and only 4% have no adoption plans.
- Security teams receive roughly 100 alerts daily (up to 1,000 at larger companies), with 28% of all alerts never investigated; 60% of respondents said an ignored alert later became a serious breach or downtime incident.
- 56% of security professionals reported an increase in AI-driven attacks over the past year, especially in finance and healthcare, citing AI-written phishing, deepfake scams, credential-stuffing, and AI-generated malware as top threats.
- Teams that tried building internal AI tools abandoned, never productionized, or replaced 46% of those projects with commercial products, despite reporting similar investigation-time gains (73%) as AI users overall (72%).
- 72% of AI users cut investigation time by at least 25%, saving roughly 25 minutes per alert, yet 57% require a human to review every AI decision and zero respondents grant AI full unsupervised autonomy.
- Data privacy and regulatory concerns (44%) and explainability (41%) rank as the top AI roadblocks, while saved time is being redirected to threat hunting — weekly hunters found malicious activity 49% of the time versus 8% for non-hunters.
Why it matters: The report exposes a widening gap in security operations: even with 96% of teams adopting or testing AI, 28% of alerts still go uninvestigated and 40% of organizations have disabled alerts entirely due to understaffing. For buyers, the most actionable finding is the durability data — nearly half of DIY SOC-AI projects were scrapped or replaced.
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