Exabeam today released a report highlighting AI agents as a growing insider risk priority for enterprise security teams.
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 the report, AI agents are goal-driven, autonomous systems that can access enterprise resources and take actions with limited human intervention — not conversational chatbots.
As AI agents become trusted participants in enterprise operations, organizations are investing in multiple approaches to monitor their activity. At the same time, security leaders identify behavioral context and correlation as the leading limitations of current monitoring approaches, along with weak cross-system visibility.
Key findings include:
- 48 percent 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 percent), compromised insiders (12 percent) and malicious insiders (12 percent).
- 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.
Security leaders also report using a variety of approaches to monitor AI agents:
- 60 percent use dedicated AI security or governance tooling.
- 56 percent extend existing SIEM, detection, or monitoring platforms.
- 56 percent use behavioral monitoring and baselining.
- 29 percent continue to rely on manual review.
Despite those investments, 27 percent 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.
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 percent of security leaders say their CFO understands the cybersecurity risks they are working to mitigate.
That alignment does not always translate into investment: 55 percent 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.”
