AI Confidence Outpaces Actual Cybersecurity Readiness Scores

New research from SimSpace shows that confidence in AI-driven cybersecurity is running ahead of measurable performance. The report, The State of Agentic Cybersecurity, draws on survey data from global CISOs and senior leaders alongside data from SimSpace environments.

Key findings include 78% of security leaders reporting high confidence in their defenses, yet teams are scoring as low as 30% in security exercises based on SimSpace's Defensive Security Readiness (DSR) data. Meanwhile, 73% of organisations are already using AI agents in their SOC at a moderate to high level, but testing has not kept pace — only 29% conduct continuous simulation testing, while 44% test biannually or less, or not at all.

The report also notes that deploying AI tools initially reduces performance by 10–20% before improvements are realised through repeated testing. Teams running frequent simulations improve DSR scores by 20–50% per event, reaching higher performance within four to six iterations.

"Assistive AI agents are mostly what's being deployed to production today; they're not fully autonomous agents," said Lee Rossey, CTO and Co-Founder of SimSpace. "It's noteworthy, though, that there's not rigorous testing of those agents prior to deployment; enterprise leaders seem to be counting on the humans in the loop to spot and correct any erratic behavior from their AI agents. Said another way, enterprise executives have not yet focused on and/or figured out how to develop trust in agentic AI before deploying it to production."

The full report can be read on SimSpace's website.