AI agents – task-specific models designed to operate autonomously or semi-autonomously given instructions — are being widely implemented across enterprises (up to 79% of all surveyed for a PwC report earlier this year). But they’re also introducing new security risks.
When an agentic AI security breach happens, companies may be quick to fire employees and assign blame, but slower to identify and fix the systemic failures that enabled it.
Forrester’s Predictions 2026: Cybersecurity and Risk predicts that the first agentic AI breach will lead to dismissals, adding that geopolitical turmoil and the pressure being put on CISOs and CIOs to deploy agentic AI quickly, while minimizing the risks.
CISOs are in for a challenging 2026
Those in organizations who compete globally are in for an especially tough next twelve months as governments move to more tightly regulate and outright control critical communication infrastructure.
Forrester also predicts the EU will establish its own known exploited vulnerability database, which translates into immediate demand for regionalized security pros that CISOs will also need to find, recruit, and hire fast if this prediction happens.
Forrester also predicts that quantum‑security spending will exceed 5% of overall IT security budgets, a plausible outcome given researchers’ steady progress toward quantum‑resistant cryptography and enterprises’ urgency to pre‑empt the ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ threat.”
Of the five major challenges CISOs will face in 2026, none is more lethal and has the potential to completely reorder the threat landscape as agentic AI breaches and the next generation of weaponized AI.
How CISOs are tacking agentic AI threats head-on
“The adoption of agentic AI introduces entirely new security threats that bypass traditional controls. These risks span data exfiltration, autonomous misuse of APIs, and covert cross-agent collusion, all of which could disrupt enterprise operations or violate regulatory mandates,” Jerry R. Geisler III, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Walmart Inc., told VentureBeat in a recent interview.
Geisler continued, articulating Walmart’s direction. “Our strategy is to build robust, proactive security controls using advanced AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM), ensuring continuous risk monitoring, data protection, regulatory compliance and operational trust.”
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By Louis Columbus