Just a year ago, SOC analysts handled most triage and incident investigations manually. Today, in Arctic Wolf’s Aurora Agentic SOC, AI agents autonomously close approximately 60% of investigations, while analysts focus on escalated cases that require their expert judgment. These are the findings of the 2026 Agentic Security Operations Report, which Arctic Wolf published at the end of October.
The report is based on telemetry from more than 11,000 Arctic Wolf MDR customers across 100 countries. It shows how agentic AI is transforming security operations (SecOps) and the work of security teams.
The SOC has changed beyond recognition in a single year
The biggest shift is in who leads the investigation. Manual investigations without AI support have all but disappeared. They have been replaced by autonomous AI workflows or a human-in-the-loop model, in which an AI agent prepares the analysis and an analyst validates it and decides on next steps.
| Investigation model | A year ago | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Manual (analyst only) | 81% | 2% |
| Human-in-the-loop (AI + analyst) | less than 1% | 38% |
| Autonomous (AI agent only) | – | approx. 60% |
Other SOC operational metrics have improved as well:
- Less noise, more relevant cases. Alert volume dropped by 19%, while the number of investigations rose by 21%. Better correlation means fewer false positives and less alert fatigue for analysts.
- Faster detection and triage. The time from an alert-generating event to an actionable ticket fell by 36%.
- High selectivity. On average, the platform opens just 13 investigations per billion telemetry records processed.
- Scalability. Since the launch of the Aurora Agentic SOC in March 2026, the platform has handled more than 200,000 investigations per week and closed more than 3 million cases.
- Endpoint telemetry makes a difference. Customers using Aurora MDR with endpoint protection see up to seven times fewer events escalated to investigation than organizations relying on standalone EDR alone.
Attackers today use AI just as security professionals do: they automate reconnaissance, phishing campaigns, and lateral movement, and they operate at machine speed. A SOC team that triages every alert manually has no chance of keeping up, and attacker dwell time in the environment grows dangerously long.
Dan Schiappa, President of Technology and Services at Arctic Wolf, stresses that neither a purely AI-driven nor a purely manual SOC is enough anymore. AI agents can handle triage and correlation across massive volumes of events, while analysts provide oversight and make decisions on complex incidents. The best results come from combining the two.
What it means for organizations
Building an in-house SOC with 24/7 coverage, a SIEM platform, AI agents, and a team of L1 to L3 analysts is too expensive and too resource-intensive for most organizations. Arctic Wolf estimates that its service costs approximately 12 times less than building and operating an agentic SOC in-house. This is, however, the vendor’s own calculation, and actual savings depend on the specific organization.
Professional security monitoring and incident response are therefore no longer the privilege of large enterprises. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) powered by agentic AI can deliver continuous threat detection and response even to mid-sized organizations that have neither their own SOC nor a security team.
Final thoughts
The Arctic Wolf report confirms that the future of SecOps is not about AI replacing analysts. AI agents will take over routine triage and correlation, while analysts return to threat hunting, complex incident response, and the decisions that truly matter.
Interested in how Arctic Wolf’s MDR service could protect your environment? Get in touch, and we’ll be happy to show you.
Sources
- Arctic Wolf: 2026 Agentic Security Operations Report (press release)
- Arctic Wolf: Press Releases
