Securing Agentic AI: What’s Real, and What’s Hype
AI agents have reached the peak of inflated expectations. The threats and opportunities they create for security teams are real. But the market for securing them seems to change every day. Read the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Agentic AI to explore what's here to stay, what's still maturing, and what's just hype.
Agentic AI is here. Here’s how security teams can prioritize.
If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the breaking AI news of today is often obsolete by next week. With that said, Aurascape believes that enterprises are deploying AI agents at speed. With this comes new attack surfaces and new defensive opportunities. Both are real, and both deserve attention.
The catch: security follows emerging technology, and emerging technology around agentic AI is noisy. It’s hard to distinguish truly disruptive new capabilities from fads, or from repackaged existing tech. And new doesn’t always mean urgent.
The Gartner® Hype Cycle for Agentic AI maps where each technology sits. It separates production-ready capabilities from those still maturing. And we believe it gives security leaders a reasonable timeline for when they can expect to be accountable for securing new agentic technologies.
Gartner recommends that leaders “extend AI governance to agentic AI: establish a framework that spans all agentic artifacts for accountable decision making and visibility for agentic operations.” One category the report defines for doing exactly that is Guardian agents: platforms that supervise AI agents in production, monitor their actions, and block risky ones in real time.
It is our understanding that Gartner expects this category to be central to how enterprises operate agents safely at scale, as guardian agents can adapt at the speed of the agents they are responsible for. Read the report to learn more.
40%
Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise apps will feature task-specific AI agents by 2026
60%
by 2028, 60% of agents will autonomously interact with external systems
30%
AI spend is shifting from IT to business units, who now fund nearly 30% of AI initiatives
Learn About Agentic AI Governance & Guardian Agents
Read the Report“The industry focus has pivoted from ‘answer questions’ to ‘take actions.’ Agents are no longer just retrieving information but are now expected to autonomously execute end-to-end tasks, such as processing an insurance claim from intake to payout without human intervention.”
– Gartner® Hype Cycle for Agentic AI
Gartner, Hype Cycle for Agentic AI, 2026, By Rajesh Kandaswamy, 2 April 2026. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Aurascape.
Aurascape Solutions
- Discover and monitor AI Get a clear picture of all AI activity.
- Safeguard AI use Secure data and compliancy in AI usage.
- Secure Agentic AI Secure how your teams use AI and build AI agents.
- Copilot readiness Prepare for and monitor AI Copilot use.
- Coding assistant guardrails Accelerate development, safely.
- Frictionless AI security Keep users and admins moving.
- AI Governance & Compliance Move from AI policy to enforceable governance.