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According to the newly released 2026 State of Exposure Management Report from Seemplicity, 88% of enterprises have integrated AI into their security stacks, yet only 31% fully trust AI-sourced recommendations to influence prioritization decisions. This disconnect suggests that while AI is being deployed at scale, its role remains limited by caution towards its decision-making authority.
88% of enterprises have integrated AI into their security stacks, but only 31% fully trust AI-sourced recommendations.
More than half of organizations report monthly security findings outpace their capacity to resolve them.
59% of security and engineering teams still negotiate who is responsible for each fix.
50% of security professionals spend more time on coordination than technical analysis.
43% of leaders admit their remediation processes are still "ad hoc."
94% of leaders can translate security risks for non-technical stakeholders, but process consistency lags.
"There's a massive surge happening in AI adoption across every cyber discipline as organizations struggle to keep up with AI-generated attacks and discoveries, but it stalls exactly where the action is needed most," said Yoran Sirkis, CEO of Seemplicity. "As an industry, we are not closing the gap between findings and fixes fast enough, and while confidence in AI agents is still developing, it is trending upward as security teams realize they can no longer manually process their way out of exponential data growth."
While more than half of all organizations report that the monthly influx of security findings frequently outpaces their capacity to resolve them, the lack of trust in automated decision-making has kept AI relegated to basic data aggregation. The result is a widening execution gap. Organizations are using AI to identify risks faster than ever, but they remain hesitant to authorize the technology to drive the actual remediation process, leaving a significant percentage of exposures unresolved in growing backlogs.
Trust Gap: 88% of organizations use AI, but only 31% trust its recommendations.
Effective Communication: 94% of leaders can translate security risks for non-technical stakeholders.
Process Inconsistency: 43% of leaders admit their remediation processes are still "ad hoc."
The Ownership Struggle: 59% of security and engineering teams still negotiate who is responsible for each fix.
Administrative Burden: 50% of security professionals spend more time on coordination than technical analysis.
The report identifies a systemic "coordination tax" that is cannibalizing the time of highly skilled security professionals. With 59% of organizations relying on manual negotiations to assign remediation owners, identifying who is responsible for a fix has become a primary operational bottleneck. This administrative drag means that for half of the industry, the time spent coordinating logistics now equals or exceeds the time spent on actual risk analysis, effectively hitting an execution ceiling that discovery tools alone cannot break.
Security leaders excel at communicating risk to business peers, yet that clarity has not yet translated into standardized operations. While 94% of respondents feel they can effectively explain progress in business terms, nearly half admit their actual remediation mechanics lack a standardized process. This suggests that while organizations have mastered the art of board-level translation, the lack of formalized exposure management workflows raises questions about the long-term accuracy and reliability of the data being shared with stakeholders.
Seemplicity's 2026 State of Exposure Management Report was conducted by Sapio Research during January 2026. The survey gathered insights from 300 U.S.-based cybersecurity leaders across multiple industries to understand how AI adoption is reshaping workforce dynamics, leadership expectations, and operational readiness.
About Seemplicity
Seemplicity is your agentic Exposure Action Platform that closes the gap between findings and fixing. Our AI agents are the first to proactively analyze business risk while applying automation to the aggregation, prioritization and remediation of exposure management. Only Seemplicity turns the overwhelming into clear, accountable tasks so you can reduce your exposure faster, with less effort and greater confidence.
