Rising From the Ashes: How Agentic AI is Unblocking Challenges in Cybersecurity

Security remains a high-cost challenge, with many problems historically deemed inefficient to address or effectively unsolvable. A significant number of these problems stem from labor-intensive tasks that create bottlenecks in defensive approaches. Agentic AI has the potential to alleviate these bottlenecks by directly ingesting and reasoning over natural language or code, thereby expanding the scope of feasible defenses. In this paper, we map open security problems to emergent agentic AI capabilities. To illustrate this potential, we examine 16 case studies, including supply chain analysis, highlighting how agentic AI may benefit defenders.