AI agents are rapidly moving from experimental demos to production-grade enterprise infrastructure. Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Salesforce are all deploying agentic AI systems that act across apps and data, not just chat. Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. But as AI extends into autonomous workflows across new verticals, cyberthreats are proliferating in lockstep. Model Context Protocol (MCP) vulnerabilities, prompt injection attacks, data exfiltration through AI assistants: the attack surface is expanding faster than the defenses designed to protect it. The risks are no longer theoretical. In a controlled red-team exercise, McKinsey’s internal AI platform “Lilli” was compromised by an autonomous agent that gained broad system access in under two hours, a stark demonstration of how quickly agentic threats can outpace human response times.

Full report : The rise of the agentic workforce is pushing CISOs to reimagine the security stack and navigate an evolving threat landscape.