Steve Santos, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, highlighted the growing interest of Indian businesses in using generative AI for security operations at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2025 in Mumbai. He highlighted the importance of ensuring that AI tools address actual problems rather than being adopted merely for the sake that they’re new. Santos pointed out that generative AI is being integrated into various security operations, particularly in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR), though adoption remains in its early stages.

While advancements toward AI assistants, which can perform complex tasks like writing detection code, are slowly gaining traction, the application of generative AI in security through chatbots that summarize information is quite promising. Santos shared the mixed response from vendors, with some eager to adopt AI for quick wins and others following a more cautious approach. Customers often express their doubtfulness about the cost savings promised by AI, which may obstruct faster adoption.

According to the 2025 estimate, AI agents will considerably increase, resulting in 70 percent adoption in threat detection and incident response by 2028.

Santos described that the shift from simple tasks to reproducing complex functions will notably increase organizational capabilities.

 

He highlighted detection engineering as a key area for generative AI's application, which is AI's potential to generate up to 70 percent of necessary detection code, which could help address skill gaps in security teams. 

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Regardless of its potential, integrating the Gen AI into security workflows poses challenges, particularly around trust and automation. Santos stressed that organizations should validate AI-generated insights and maintain high data quality to avoid errors. He encouraged security leaders to embrace experimentation with AI technologies while listening to their teams for successful integration.