Exabeam, the leader in behaviour intelligence for the agentic enterprise, today 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 organisation, ahead of external threat actors, compromised insiders, and malicious insiders. The findings also show organisations are expanding AI agent monitoring but continue to face challenges understanding their behaviour across systems and business context.
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, organisations are investing in multiple approaches to monitoring their activity. At the same time, security leaders identify behavioural context and correlation as the leading limitations of current monitoring approaches, while cross-system visibility remains a significant gap.
“Organisations are making meaningful progress in monitoring AI agents, but monitoring activity isn’t the same as understanding behaviour,” 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 behaviour.”
听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 organisations 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 organisation 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 behaviour rank among the top concerns for security and finance leaders
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Organisations 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 behavioural monitoring and baselining
- 29% continue to rely on manual review
Despite those investments, 27% identify limited behavioural context and correlation as the biggest limitation of their current monitoring approach, while poor visibility across environments, alert prioritisation 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 83% 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.”
