This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on November 9, 2026 – November 15, 2026Every new wave of technology brings fresh cybersecurity challenges. Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is no exception.
Organisations are increasingly exploring how agentic AI can improve productivity, automate routine tasks and support faster decision-making. As adoption gathers pace, cybersecurity deserves equal attention.
Unlike earlier AI tools that respond to prompts, agentic AI can analyse information, make decisions and act with minimal human intervention. That expands the cybersecurity challenge beyond protecting people, systems and infrastructure. Organisations also need to consider how autonomous AI itself is governed, monitored and secured.
While fully autonomous offensive AI may not be widespread today, the technology is evolving quickly enough for organisations to start putting the right safeguards in place now.
On the defence side, agentic AI is beginning to reshape how cybersecurity teams detect and respond to threats. By analysing threats and acting in real time, it enables security teams to detect, investigate and respond to incidents far more quickly than traditional human-led processes.
In today’s security operations centres, where analysts are often swamped with alerts and bogged down by false positives, manual validation can take days. Agentic AI can reduce investigation time from days to minutes by independently querying data, analysing logs and presenting a more complete picture of potential threats.
What sets it apart from conventional automation is its ability to build context over time, allowing it to prioritise critical alerts and reduce information overload. The AI can then present its findings to human cyber defenders, offering a more comprehensive picture that enables swift and better-informed decisions.
However, the very speed and autonomy that make agentic AI a powerful defender also introduce significant new risks across technical, ethical and operational domains.
To this end, Malaysia is strengthening its approach to AI and cyber governance with the proposed Artificial Intelligence Governance Bill, together with the Cyber Security Act 2024, which reflects a growing recognition that responsible AI adoption must be supported by clear governance, accountability and appropriate security safeguards.
As organisations deploy more autonomous AI systems, securing the AI itself becomes just as important as securing the underlying infrastructure. AI agents require privileged access to systems and sensitive data to perform their tasks, creating new identity and access management challenges.
Their digital credentials must be properly stored, protected, monitored and governed. Without this, AI agents could become high-value targets for attackers seeking to exploit trusted access. Upcoming AI governance efforts in Malaysia are expected to place greater emphasis on risk management, accountability, transparency and incident reporting, which are all important foundations for responsible AI adoption.
Autonomy itself is another source of risk. An AI agent operating outside carefully defined parameters can reach the wrong conclusion or take actions too quickly. For example, while an AI system might instantly isolate a suspected malware, it could also mistakenly shut down a server supporting financial transactions or even medical life-support systems, if guardrails are not in place.
Without carefully modelled safeguards, such errors could have serious operational consequences.
Preparing for responsible adoption
Responsible adoption of agentic AI requires more than deploying new technology. It calls for the right security controls, governance framework and operating model from the outset. Organisations should be thinking beyond deployment and focus equally on resilience, accountability and long-term oversight. Achieving this will require closer collaboration between governments, technology providers and businesses to establish practical safeguards that can evolve alongside the technology.
Trusted platforms for joint research and real-time intelligence sharing will also play an important role in accelerating responsible adoption while reducing the risks of fragmented approaches across the industry.
In Malaysia, organisations are already beginning to explore how agentic AI can work in support of human defenders, with AI recommendations and human decisions documented to build organisational knowledge over time.
Even so, keeping humans in the loop remains non-negotiable. While AI agents can handle background processing and analysis, human oversight remains crucial, especially for high-impact decisions.
Technology leaders will also need to rethink how cybersecurity teams operate. As AI increasingly supports analysis and routine investigations, security professionals can spend more time on threat hunting, strategic decision-making and complex incidents where human judgement remains essential.
For many organisations, a phased deployment approach will be the most practical way to build confidence while minimising operational risk. Starting with non-critical environments allows teams to test, learn and refine AI systems before wider deployment.
Ultimately, success hinges less on budgets than on talent. Organisations need discerning professionals with hands-on experience who can objectively assess the technology’s capabilities and limitations. And as ever, the fundamentals still matter: System hardening, patch management, knowing your digital footprint and protecting crown-jewel data should come first.
Human judgement will remain central to cybersecurity, even as AI takes on more autonomous roles. Agentic AI will reshape how organisations approach cyber defence, governance and risk management, but it should not replace accountability. Organisations that combine autonomous technologies with strong cybersecurity fundamentals, experienced talent and appropriate human oversight will be better positioned to realise AI’s potential while managing its risks responsibly.
Jeremy Moke is senior director at Ensign InfoSecurity Malaysia
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