Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The AI SOC has arrived. According to the 2026 AI SOC Leadership Report, 94% of organizations are using AI in the SOC in some capacity. The question in 2026 is no longer whether to adopt AI-driven SOC automation, but rather how to do so. Is the architecture behind that adoption actually working?

Alert volumes are higher than ever. Client budgets are not. For managed security service providers, that math doesn’t work and no amount of hiring will fix it.

See how Torq harnesses AI in your SOC to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats faster. Request a Demo John White is the Field CISO for EMEA at Torq. A respected security executive with more than 20 years of leadership experience, John previously served as CISO at Virgin Atlantic, where he led a multi-year transformation deploying the Torq AI SOC Platform to modernize cyber operations.

See how Torq harnesses AI in your SOC to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats faster. Request a Demo I recently sat between two people who think about the AI SOC operations from completely different angles — and spent 50 minutes watching them land in the same place.

See how Torq harnesses AI in your SOC to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats faster. Request a Demo When we started building Torq four years ago, we had a thesis: the SOC was broken, and automation — real automation, not another tool bolted onto the stack — was the way to fix it. AI has since changed the game entirely. But has it streamlined the SOC, or introduced new complexity? We wanted to find out.

Chris Jacob, Field CISO, Securonix For years, security operations has been measured by effort. More alerts are reviewed. More logs are ingested. More tools are deployed. More dashboards are built. On paper, that can look like progress. In practice, many CIOs know better.

Every major shift in security operations starts with a shift in the underlying platform. The AI era is no different. As artificial intelligence moves from novelty to necessity, the real dividing line in cybersecurity will not be which vendor can add AI features the fastest. It will be which platforms are built on the right foundation to make AI useful in real operations and trustworthy when the stakes are high. That foundation is data, but not in the simplistic sense the market often uses the term.

See how Torq harnesses AI in your SOC to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats faster. Request a Demo Security teams are being asked to move faster and handle more complexity, while the threats they defend against are increasingly AI-assisted. When I wrote about VoidLink in January, my point was simple: you cannot fight machine-speed threats with human-speed defense. Attackers are using AI to code, adapt, and scale attacks while humans are still grinding away doing the heavy lifting in the SOC.

When SOAR emerged around 2015, it was trying to solve a real problem: SOC analysts were drowning in manual, repetitive tasks across disconnected tools. SOAR promised to connect those tools, automate the workflows between them, and give analysts their time back. For a while, it mostly delivered. That era is long dead.