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Our Key Takeaways
- AI SOC agents are an emerging technology designed to automate and augment routine SOC tasks.
- Identifies AI SOC agents as having the potential to improve efficiency, reduce false positives, and ease workforce challenges.
- These tools are still early in maturity, with adoption estimated at just 1% to 5% of the target market.
- Gartner advises security leaders to baseline current operations and run pilots to validate potential benefits.
- Dropzone AI offers one of the most mature AI SOC agent platforms available today.
Introduction
Dropzone AI is included as a Sample Vendor for AI SOC agents in Gartner Hype Cycle™ for Security Operations, 2025. As the company that we believe helped to create this market, we are thrilled to see Gartner® recognizing the value that AI SOC agents offer for resource-constrained security operations teams. We believe the inclusion of AI SOC agents as a new security operations technology indicates that the market is starting to form. This blog post summarizes the state of the emerging AI SOC agent market. Dig deeper by downloading the full Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2025 report.
Help Has Arrived for the SOC
Amid alert overload and a persistent skills shortage, SOC leaders are being asked to do more with less. The Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2025 highlights one emerging technology that may offer relief: AI SOC agents.
These AI-driven tools are designed to automate and augment key security operations tasks that traditionally consume significant analyst time and expertise. According to Gartner, AI SOC agents can assist with:
- Investigation through natural language queries
- False positive reduction
- Alert enrichment
- Attack path contextualization
- Reporting summarization
- Next-step advisory
By automating these functions, AI SOC agents promise to help security teams scale efficiently, reduce manual effort, and improve investigation quality.
What Is the Hype Cycle for Security Operations - and Why Should SOC Leaders Pay Attention?
The Gartner Hype Cycle “methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals.”
For CISOs and SOC directors, we believe the Hype Cycle serves as a valuable tool to assess when to engage with new security operations technologies. In the 2025 Hype Cycle, AI SOC agents are placed in the Innovation Trigger stage.
The Gartner report states:
“AI SOC agents have been recently introduced to the market with the primary aim of alleviating cybersecurity resource constraints and workforce challenges. These agents automate the completion of routine tasks, such as security event triage, enabling teams to scale more efficiently. As a result, security professionals can redirect their focus to critical activities that require human expertise, including incident response, threat hunting and advanced analysis. The recommendation is to leverage these technologies to augment the operator, so they can refocus on other tasks that require critical thinking.”
The Business Case for AI SOC Agents
The reality is that most security teams face overwhelming workloads and difficulty recruiting and retaining talent. AI SOC agents aim to ease these pressures by automating routine, resource-intensive tasks.
As Gartner explains, “Effective augmentation can lead to reduction in time required to perform certain tasks, such as managing false positives. It can also lead to other program benefits such as reducing skill sets required to perform activities, reducing errors and increasing the overall performance of SOC operations.”
AI SOC agents can help teams:
- Enrich and investigate alerts faster
- Reduce the volume of false positives analysts must handle
- Generate attack timelines and contextual insights automatically
- Lower the barrier to entry for junior analysts by simplifying workflows
This not only boosts operational efficiency but also allows experienced team members to focus on higher-value activities like threat hunting and incident response. As Gartner puts it, “Users are often forced to make concessions on what alerts are investigated due to resource constraints. AI SOC agents promise to auto investigate and close out lesser alerts, leaving more time for humans to investigate alerts of greater interest.”
How to Evaluate AI SOC Agents
As Gartner notes in the report, AI SOC agents remain an emerging technology with relatively few production deployments. Security leaders should take care that any solution delivers measurable benefits and be cautious of exaggerated vendor claims. The report advises teams to:
- Baseline their current SOC workflows to identify areas for AI-driven improvement
- Run pilot programs to validate effectiveness and fit
- Consult with SIEM and XDR vendors to understand how AI SOC agents fit into their existing ecosystems
At Dropzone AI, we understand that prospective buyers want to learn and evaluate on their own before contacting the vendor team, and to that end we’ve made many resources publicly available including: pricing, product documentation, a demo gallery, and an evaluation environment with test data.
Why Dropzone AI Is Trusted to Deliver in This Emerging Market
Today, Dropzone AI protects over 100 organizations globally (through our MSSP partners). Case studies from CBTS and Assala Energy demonstrate the product maturity and tangible benefits we’ve delivered in production environments.
Our inclusion in the Hype Cycle report comes less than a year after Gartner named Dropzone AI as a Cool Vendor in the Cool Vendors™ for the Modern Security Operations Center report.
We have helped dozens of organizations to deploy our AI SOC analyst. From enterprises looking to build 24/7 SOC functionality to MSSPs looking to improve MDR service quality, Dropzone has successfully helped organizations make their SOC functions more efficient and effective.
As the first production-ready AI SOC analyst, our system includes many advanced features not found in other offerings, including:
- AI Interviewer that automates end-user evidence gathering as part of investigations
- Context memory to retain environment-specific knowledge and improve investigation quality
- Insight tags to surface critical context and enrich reports automatically
Want to see it for yourself? Try our self-guided demo to see the product in a live environment.
