An “onslaught” of new tools and resulting stress on security controls defined 2025 for many cybersecurity directors. As the industry moves into 2026, a more disciplined strategic focus is replacing the initial hype surrounding artificial intelligence. Our predictions for 2026 suggest a period of rapid maturation where AI moves from a fragmented innovation to a standardized, usable enterprise asset.
Patrick Ethier, CTO at SecureOps, believes we’re finally addressing the "growing pains" of the past year. His outlook for 2026 is clear. AI is about to "grow up" by shifting from a stressor on security controls to a standardized, governed toolset.
A significant barrier in 2025 was the chaotic landscape of fragmented protocols. Security teams struggled with "acronym creep," dealing with MCP (Model Context Protocol), RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and A2A (Agent-to-Agent) without a unified framework. Patrick predicts that 2026 will see the establishment of common, standardized interfaces for Agentic AI, driven by collaborations between major providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and the Linux Foundation.
"The hard part was the creeping of acronyms—MCP, RAG, A2A—and that was because everybody was doing their own thing," says Patrick. "The AI providers now are saying that they want to define common and standardized interfaces so that external tools can all use these AIs and create agents that are all working within an open-source framework."
For the business, this standardization will be a major development. It will help eliminate vendor lock-in and allow organizations to swap models without rebuilding their entire infrastructure. These common interfaces will make it much easier to test AI agents and contribute to creating effective security controls by standardizing protocols and APIs that can more easily assimilate into new and existing controls across the enterprise.
We predict that the emergence of the AI Gateway will define 2026. Much like the rise of SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) in previous years, this architecture provides a centralized point to control and monitor AI traffic across the corporation. This addresses a primary business concern: preventing data leakage while maintaining the productivity gains offered by AI.
Patrick expects a wave of specialized security packages to hit the market in the coming year to support this shift, reporting, "It’s going to be the year of AI gateways. We’re going to see packages come out from all the vendors from a DLP (Data Loss Prevention) standpoint to SASE packages of how to control your AI and how to monitor AI usage in your environment."
To support this architectural shift, the industry is rapidly moving toward ISO 42001 as the foundational governance framework for 2026.
While previous standards like ISO 27001 focused on general data security, ISO 42001 is the first international standard specifically designed for AI Management Systems (AIMS). It provides the "operating system" for compliance that organizations need to meet the strict requirements of new global regulations.
For a CISO, adopting this standard establishes a certifiable management system to prove proactive governance of AI risks, like bias, transparency, and data leakage, to regulators and board members.
These advancements in standardization and governance lead directly to operational gains in the SOC. Andrew Morrison, Senior SOC Manager at SecureOps, predicts a fundamental shift in how incident response tools utilize AI. We are moving from simple automation to synthesis.
Synthesis allows the AI to manage the entire narrative of a security event from start to finish.
"The AI portion is changing individual actions into a start-to-end process—a thought process—capable of synthesizing results that previously required human intervention."
The business value of this shift is human capital optimization. By 2026, AI tools will be accurate enough to handle the "low-hanging fruit" of triage. When AI handles the synthesis of routine events, high-tier analysts can focus on advanced threats. This solves the cost equation for the SOC, allowing for greater efficiency without an exponential increase in headcount.
By 2027, the groundwork laid in 2026 will be fully established. The prediction for the coming year is a move away from basic network monitoring toward a much higher strategic level of defense.
By embracing standardized interfaces and "Agentic" frameworks, organizations can implement best practices easily and efficiently. The goal for 2026 is to ensure that the organization is not just using AI, but governing it in a way that provides long-term, predictable value.
Ready to prepare your organization for the next wave of automation? Explore our detailed guide on Agentic AI Security Recommendations for the Next Phase of AI to learn how to build a resilient, AI-ready defense.