Exabeam, the leader in behavior 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 organization, ahead of external threat actors, compromised insiders, and malicious insiders. The findings also show organizations are expanding AI agent monitoring but continue to face challenges understanding their behavior 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, organizations are investing in multiple approaches to monitoring their activity. At the same time, security leaders identify behavioral context and correlation as the leading limitations of current monitoring approaches, while cross-system visibility remains a significant gap. “Organizations are making meaningful progress in monitoring AI agents, but monitoring activity isn’t the same as understanding behavior,” 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 behavior.”

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 organizations 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 organization 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 behavior rank among the top concerns for security and finance leaders.

Organizations 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 behavioral monitoring and baselining.

  • 29% continue to rely on manual review.

Despite those investments, 27% 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.

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 81% 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.”

Report Availability

To download The Agentic Insider: From Monitoring to Understanding, visit www.Exabeam.com/from-monitoring-to-understanding

Methodology

Sapio Research conducted this survey on behalf of Exabeam in June 2026 among 600 professionals at organizations with 500 or more employees, including 300 IT decision-makers responsible for security and 300 finance decision-makers. Respondents were based in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia. Interviews were conducted online using email invitations and survey panels. The results carry a 95% confidence level with a margin of error of ±4.0 percentage points.

About Exabeam

Exabeam is the leader in Behavior Intelligence for the agentic enterprise. As organizations deploy digital workers and confront machine-speed adversaries, Exabeam applies agent-powered analytics to understand and govern the behavior of both human and non-human insiders. With integrated Exabeam Nova cybersecurity agents, Exabeam delivers flexible, industry-proven solutions for insider threat coverage of humans and agents and faster, more accurate threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR). As the pioneer of user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and the innovator behind Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA), Exabeam is trusted by more than 3,000 enterprises worldwide to reduce risk, secure the digital workforce, and accelerate security operations. Learn more at www.exabeam.com.

Exabeam: Stop Insider Threats. Human or AI.

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