Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Will Ledesma, Senior Director of MDR Cybersecurity Operations at N-able
As organizations look ahead to 2026, many will assume the greatest cybersecurity challenges lie in keeping up with rapidly advancing technology. In reality, the most dangerous gap emerging in AI-enabled security isn’t technological at all. It’s human. The defining cyber gap of 2026 will be trust.
Over the past year, security teams have made meaningful progress adopting AI. Tools can triage alerts faster, enrich telemetry more intelligently, and surface risks that once took analysts hours to uncover. Yet despite these advancements, many organizations stop short of letting AI do the full extent of what it’s capable of doing. They want the benefits of automation without granting the access, authority, or integration required for AI to operate effectively. That hesitation will become a liability in the year ahead.
The Trust Gap
This trust gap shows up in subtle but consequential ways. AI is often restricted to isolated tasks rather than embedded across workflows. Automated actions are delayed by manual approvals. Access to systems is tightly constrained out of fear of unintended consequences. While these controls may feel prudent, they often slow response times and blunt the value of AI precisely when speed matters most.
Attackers, meanwhile, don’t have the same hesitation. They are increasingly automating entire attack chains, from reconnaissance and credential abuse to lateral movement and persistence. They don’t pause for approvals or second-guess machine-driven decisions. The result is an uneven playing field: defenders constrained by caution, attackers empowered by automation.
Striking the Right Balance
In 2026, resilient security operations centers will look fundamentally different. Rather than treating AI as a supporting tool, they will allow it to operate across the full security lifecycle ingesting data, identifying anomalous behavior and executing mitigation actions under clearly defined guardrails. Human oversight will remain essential, but it will shift from micromanagement to supervision and strategic judgment.
Trusting AI doesn’t mean abandoning control. It means designing governance that enables action rather than prevents it. Clear decision trees, defined thresholds, and auditable workflows allow AI to act confidently, while ensuring humans retain accountability. When trust is built into processes, organizations gain both speed and confidence.
The alternative is costly. Security teams that hesitate to operationalize AI will find themselves overwhelmed by alert volume and stuck in a reactive mode, increasingly reliant on manual intervention. Over time, this slows detection, extends dwell time, and increases the likelihood that small incidents escalate into major disruptions. In an environment where minutes matter, hesitation becomes exposure.
Aligning Around the Risk of Hesitation
Closing the trust gap also has implications beyond technology. It requires leadership alignment, cultural change, and a willingness to rethink long-standing assumptions about control and risk. Leaders must recognize that refusing to trust AI doesn’t eliminate risk; it just redistributes it. The risk shifts from potential automation errors to guaranteed human bottlenecks.
Security leaders must be able to clearly articulate why AI-driven efficiency matters to the entire organization. Entry-level analysts need to understand how AI reduces noise and burnout, not replaces their judgment. Middle managers need confidence that automation will improve consistency and accountability, not introduce chaos. Executives need a business-level narrative that connects AI trust to faster containment, reduced exposure, measurable resilience, and ROI. Without a shared understanding of these outcomes, even the most sophisticated tools will remain underutilized.
Speed, for Security’s Sake
The future of cyber defense depends on finely calibrated trust. AI should be empowered to handle scale, speed, and repetition, while humans focus on context, strategy, and judgment. This partnership is the only way to keep pace with modern threats. Organizations that embrace this model can move faster and respond smarter. Beyond that, they’ll reduce critical operational fatigue across their security teams.
In 2026, the question won’t be whether organizations have access to advanced AI. Most will. The real question will be whether they trust it enough to let it work. Those that close the trust gap can redefine what effective cyber defense looks like. Those that don’t may find themselves constrained not by lack of technology, but by their own reluctance to lean into it.
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