The Reveal Platform
The “2025 Cybersecurity Insiders Pulse of AI-Powered SOC” report marks a pivotal moment in cybersecurity, revealing that Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are facing mounting pressure from surging data volumes, alert fatigue, and limited visibility across identity and cloud environments. Fragmented tools and analyst burnout are compounding these challenges, slowing response times even as threats grow more sophisticated and frequent with the use of AI.
A key insight from the report is the growing focus on identity as the primary attack vector. Social engineering and phishing top the list of concerns for 78% of security leaders, while 73% cite identity-based threats as a significant issue. Despite this, 67% of organizations still lack visibility into Identity, entitlement, and access behaviors, leaving critical gaps in their defenses.
A global survey of 739 cybersecurity leaders reveals a decisive shift: AI is now viewed as a critical enabler of SOC performance, not just a future innovation. As identity-based threats grow and traditional tools fall short, organizations are turning to AI to drive scale, speed, and resilience.
This report highlights:
The findings point to a clear trend: AI-powered SOCs are emerging as the new standard, with momentum driven by real-world results and a growing urgency to modernize.
Current SOC operations are described as “buried — not just in alert volume, but in disconnected tools, fragmented telemetry, expanding cloud workloads, and siloed data.” This paints a picture of overwhelmed teams struggling to maintain control in an increasingly complex threat landscape.
What are the top 5 most pressing challenges facing your SOC today?
The report reveals that 77% of organizations have seen an increase in alert volume, with nearly half (46%) experiencing a spike of over 25% in the past year. This surge is contributing to widespread alert fatigue, cited as the top challenge by 76% of respondents, closely followed by analyst burnout and staffing shortages (73%). Compounding the issue, 64% of organizations report that detection, triage, and investigation processes remain “heavily manual,” placing unsustainable pressure on small, overloaded teams and slowing response times.
Visibility remains a significant concern, with 96% of respondents acknowledging critical blind spots—most notably in cloud infrastructure (74%) and identity and access behavior (67%). These gaps align directly with top threat concerns such as identity-based attacks, phishing, and cloud risks.
Where does your SOC face the most significant data visibility gaps?
The report warns: “The most exploited threat vector [Identity and human risk] is still the least monitored, as many organizations trade visibility for affordability.” This trade-off leaves SOCs vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated attacks.
Tool sprawl is another major obstacle. 45% of organizations use 20 or more distinct security tools for detection, investigation, and response, creating “operational friction at nearly every stage of the incident lifecycle.”
Adding to the challenge, 64% of organizations take between one week and three months to fully onboard new security data feed into their SIEM, delaying access to actionable intelligence and reducing agility.
The report highlights growing dissatisfaction with traditional SIEM platforms. With 78% of organizations are either dissatisfied or forced to augment their current SIEM, 41% expressing outright dissatisfaction and 16% actively evaluating replacements.
As the report notes, “Most SIEMs weren’t designed for today’s dynamic, identity-driven threat landscape,” underscoring the need for modernization and AI-driven solutions.
In response to these challenges, AI adoption is accelerating. 87% of organizations have deployed, are deploying or are evaluating AI-powered SOC tools, with 31% already using them in core workflows. AI is rapidly becoming foundational to SOC operations.
Despite high interest, trust in AI remains a hurdle; only 9% are “very confident” in AI-generated alerts. Building trust requires transparency and proven real-world performance. Despite the concerns in accuracy, adoption is already delivering results. According to the survey, AI is already automating key SOC tasks such as:
Which SOC analyst workflows have been most successfully automated using AI
According to the report, to successfully operationalize AI within the SOC, organizations should adopt a set of best practices:
The future SOC is AI-powered, not to replace analysts, but to amplify their capabilities. By automating repetitive tasks and surfacing context-rich insights, AI helps security teams stay ahead of evolving threats with speed, clarity, and resilience.
Ready to transform your SOC with AI? Download the full 2025 AI-Powered SOC Transformation Report and explore how your organization can stay ahead of evolving threats.
Social engineering/phishing and identity-based threats are the top concerns. A key issue is that many organizations lack visibility into entitlement and access behavior for identity-based threats, often due to the cost or complexity of data ingestion.
Alert volume has increased for 77% of organizations, with nearly half reporting a spike of over 25%. A significant consequence is analyst burnout and persistent staffing shortages, as teams struggle with alert fatigue and repetitive or heavily manual processes.
While 87% of organizations are deploying, piloting, or evaluating AI-powered SOC tools, only 31% use them across core detection and response workflows. This gap indicates a high interest but limited practical implementation, potentially from the trust concerns (only 9% are very confident in accuracy).
AI automation has delivered measurable gains in cutting investigation time. 60% of adopters reported a reduction of at least 25%, with 21% seeing reductions greater than 50%.
The top three objectives are accelerating the speed of security investigations and incident response (72%), reducing alert volume and false positives (65%), and increasing automation of processes by leveraging AI (61%).
