Looking Ahead at 2026: The Year Cybersecurity, Data, and AI Collide

If 2025 was the year AI went mainstream, 2026 will be the year it tests the limits of enterprise resilience. According to Cyera Research Labs’ 2025 State of AI Data Security Report, 83% of enterprises already use AI, yet only 13% report strong visibility into how it touches their data. 

The ground is shifting faster than organizations can adapt: threats are scaling, data is fragmenting, and AI is now embedded in everything from customer conversations to internal decision-making. The result is a paradox - while businesses are innovating at unprecedented speed, their attack surfaces, governance models, and security controls are struggling to keep pace.

So we asked around, digging in to find out what’s on the minds of leaders and Cyera’s Office of the CSO, and one theme stands out: 2026 won’t be defined by a single breakthrough in AI, but by the compounding effect of speed. This means faster attacks, faster adoption, faster consequences. And to keep up with that, organizations need the security to deliver visibility, control, and confidence needed to enable safe AI adoption at scale. 

Cybercrime Scales Faster Than Defense Can Adapt‍

For years, the barrier to entry for cybercriminals has been falling. In 2026, it drops even further. As Rick Holland, Data and AI Security Officer at Cyera, notes the ‘Cybercrime-as-a-Service’ economy has made it trivial for threat actors  to buy tools, infrastructure, and expertise on demand. And with commoditized AI now woven into public APIs and open-source models, criminals don’t need sophistication, all they need efficiency.

“For cybercriminals, it’s about ROI,” Rick explains. “Whether that efficiency comes from traditional methods or AI doesn’t matter.

At the other end of the spectrum, nation-state actors are embracing offensive AI with industrial force. They’re using dedicated data centers and GPU clusters to automate reconnaissance, discover vulnerabilities, and generate exploits at a scale humans can’t match.

From a defender’s perspective, the distinction is irrelevant. Whether the threat is a low-level crew using cheap automation or a state actor innovating with advanced AI, the effect is the same: defending gets harder. The asymmetry widens. Pressure on CISOs increases. And the speed of cybercrime accelerates past what most organizations are prepared to handle.”

CISOs Move From Tools to Precision‍

But attackers aren’t the only source of complexity. Enterprises have created their own. As data sprawls across clouds, SaaS platforms, generative AI workflows, third-party ecosystems, and shadow systems, CISOs are no longer just defending infrastructure,  they’re defending chaos.

“2026 will fundamentally reshape security strategy. Rather than acquiring more tools, the most forward-leaning CISOs will pursue precision: prioritizing the data that generates revenue for their businesses, and the data that adversaries are targeting. CISOs will validate the controls that matter the most, and eliminate the blind spots that come from years of technical debt,” added Rick. “Not all data is created equal. Defense shouldn’t be universal. It should be targeted.”

This mindset is driving what many describe as a renaissance in data security. Organizations are rediscovering that resilience begins with understanding where sensitive data lives, where it moves, who interacts with it, and whether the controls designed to protect it actually work. Those that can answer these questions quickly (and continuously) will be the ones that maintain resilience as the threat landscape changes.

“In 2026, the line between the CISO and CDO starts to merge. Their missions converge around understanding and protecting data,” added Tom Mazzaferro, Chief Data Officer at Cyera. “Security can’t defend what they can’t see, and data teams can’t deliver value without controls and automation. When these leaders operate as one, it becomes a competitive advantage.”

Agentic AI: The Inflection Point Enterprises Aren’t Ready For‍

While AI adoption continues across the enterprise, 2026 will mark a turning point for agentic AI: autonomous, interconnected systems capable of acting on behalf of users. And according to Jason Clark, Cyera’s Chief Strategy Officer, most organizations are deeply unprepared for what comes next.

“The thing that’s going to change the industry and our lives in a massive way is agents,” Jason warns. Unlike today’s narrow automations, agents will “outnumber everything else,” interacting across systems, APIs, and data layers in ways current security tools cannot distinguish. “Your endpoint security isn’t agentic-aware. It doesn’t know whether you’re doing something versus an agent doing something.”

And the concern isn’t theoretical. As these agents proliferate, the boundaries between human and machine actions blur, creating a mesh of activity that legacy controls simply cannot parse. “Agents are going to exponentially change our enterprises and our life,” Jason adds. “And very rapidly.”

This shift demands a new kind of oversight - an autonomy model with guardrails similar to how parents gradually expand a child’s freedom. AI agents will need constrained environments, defined permissions, and continuous monitoring. Jason points to autonomous vehicles as the template: nearly fully autonomous, but always with a human in the loop when risk escalates. 

“If we can do this with cars,” he argues, “how can we not automate most of what we do every day to manage data and risk?”

‍AI Adoption Grows, But Trust Sets the Pace‍

Outside the agentic frontier (and despite the hype!) 2026 won’t be the year enterprises hand over the keys to autonomous AI. Instead, adoption will look pragmatic and measured. Security leaders will move quickly on low-risk automation but cautiously on anything that touches production systems or sensitive data.

And while shadow AI became the industry’s favorite buzzword in 2025, 2026 will be the year organizations realize they can’t manage what they can’t see. AI isn’t just being deployed by IT; it’s emerging organically across business units, embedded in SaaS tools, quietly added by teams seeking speed. The real challenge is no longer identifying where AI should be - it’s uncovering where AI already is, how it’s interacting with sensitive data, and whether those interactions align with enterprise risk tolerances.

Agentic AI will dominate headlines, yet few organizations will allow autonomous systems to act without human oversight. The real progress will come from hybrid approaches (think copilots, not commanders) where AI accelerates work but humans maintain judgment and accountability.

Tom sees the ripple effects across the broader enterprise: AI is already reshaping how people discover products (machine-initiated traffic up, human browsing down), how companies operate (with ⅓ of manual workflows automated), and how software is development (AI generating +50% of new code by mid-year). “These shifts pressure business models, talent strategies, and compliance programs, and in some cases, break them entirely.” 

Governance and Research Become Enterprise Imperatives‍

The most overlooked story of 2026 may be governance - or rather, the lack of it. AI now touches regulated data, customer communications, eligibility decisions, forecasting, internal reporting, and automated processes. Yet only 7% of organizations maintain formal AI governance, and just 11% feel ready for impending regulation^*.

Sol Rashidi, Cyera’s Chief Strategy Officer of Data and AI, puts it bluntly: “AI risk spans functions. When a single decision can trigger multiple interconnected blast radii across an organization, governance must rise with it.”

At the same time, Cyera Research Labs is seeing a methodological shift in how AI systems must be evaluated. Models update weekly. Prompt-injection variants evolve in days. Data flows reshape themselves every time a business team adds a new workflow. Traditional audit cycles can’t keep up.

“You cannot analyze AI risk episodically,” adds Shiran Bareli, VP of Research at Cyera. “The system itself is dynamic. Only telemetry tells the truth.”

The conclusion is clear: AI governance and AI security research must become continuous, telemetry-driven, and tied to real-world behavior. Anything less leaves organizations blind to emerging risks.

‍Real-Time Behavior Becomes the Dominant Risk Vector‍

By 2026, real-time behavior (not configuration) becomes the primary risk surface for AI systems. Telemetry from production environments shows the same pattern: static policies fail in dynamic, agentic workflows. 

Four behaviors in particular routinely break classical controls: 

1. prompt-driven overrides that push models beyond expected constraints
2. indirect data exposure through multi-step or summarization chains
3. tool chaining that executes compound actions across systems
4. privilege drift, where agents expand what they can reach based on inferred context rather than explicit permission

These risks can’t be governed by pre-defined policy alone. As Cyera’s VP of Product, Guy Gertner, observes, “AI does not violate configuration. It violates expectations. That requires real-time detection.” 

In practice, that means security teams must continuously monitor agentic behavior and intervene the moment workflows deviate from acceptable patterns - because the most dangerous AI incidents in 2026 won’t come from static misconfigurations, but from emergent behavior unfolding in real time.

What Will Define the Leaders in 2026‍

In a year defined by speed, resilience will depend on clarity: clarity of data, clarity of governance, and clarity of risk. The organizations that succeed in 2026 will be the ones that understand their data, validate their controls, and enable AI with intention, not optimism.

The clearer the data becomes, the stronger an organization’s future gets.

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^* Cyera Research Labs’ 2025 State of AI Data Security Report, October 2025

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