Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

A year ago, a handful of vendors called themselves an “AI SOC.” Today, more than 100 do. The label now means whatever the person selling it needs it to mean, leaving security teams to buy very different products under the same two words. So let’s sort the market. Beneath the “agentic” branding, most AI SOC vendors fall into one of four categories, and none of them clears the bar. Each can look capable in a demo.

The rules of offensive security just changed. Here's what every SecOps leader needs to do about it.

In the current threat landscape, the pressure on security operations center (SOC) teams has never been higher. Yet for many organizations, the reality of daily security operations is less high-tech threat hunting and more of an uphill battle against manual processes and fragmented data. To understand why SOC teams are burning out, let's walk through a typical morning of an SOC analyst.

AI SOC memory is the difference between an investigation that starts from your team’s history and one that starts from zero. In most security operations centers, there is none: context disappears the moment a case closes. When a new alert fires, the investigation effectively starts from zero.

Co-founder and COO Agentic SOC architecture, explained: how API-driven security operations work when AI agents are the primary operators. Most security operations centers are built around a dashboard. The dashboard is how analysts see what is happening, take action, respond to alerts, and manage cases. This design choice made sense when humans were the only operators in the environment.

See how Torq harnesses AI in your SOC to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats faster. Request a Demo The first half of 2026 is coming to a close. And unless you live under a rock, there is only one takeaway: The AI SOC revolution is here, and Torq is winning.

See how Torq harnesses AI in your SOC to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats faster. Request a Demo David Melamed is Head of Emerging Technologies at Torq. He joined through Torq’s acquisition of Jit, which he co-founded and led as CTO since 2020, building agentic security on a production Context Graph. A cloud security veteran with 20+ years of experience, David previously held senior technical roles at Cisco (via the CloudLock acquisition) and MyHeritage.