How to Evaluate AI SOC Agents: 7 Questions Gartner Says You Should Be Asking

The market for Agentic SOC, or AI SOC agents as Gartner calls them, is moving fast. Dozens of startups have entered the space in the past 18 months, each promising to transform how security operations teams handle alert triage, investigation, and response.

The pitch is usually some version of the same thing: deploy an AI agent, reduce your alert backlog, and free your analysts to focus on higher-value work.

Some of that promise is real. But Gartner's latest research on the category suggests most organizations evaluating these tools are asking the wrong questions, or not asking enough of them.

In a recent Gartner report titled Validate the Promises of AI SOC Agents With These Key Questions, analysts Craig Lawson and Andrew Davies lay out a structured evaluation framework for cybersecurity leaders considering AI SOC agent deployments.

Their central finding is sobering: while 70% of large SOCs are expected to pilot AI agents for Tier 1 and Tier 2 operations by 2028, only 15% will achieve measurable improvements without structured evaluation. You can download a complementary copy of the full report here.

That gap between adoption and outcomes is huge, if trust. It suggests the problem facing most security teams is less about whether to adopt AI in the SOC and more about how to separate genuine operational improvement from marketing noise.

Here are the key areas Gartner recommends evaluating, and why each one is critical to success.

1. Does it actually reduce the work your team does today?

This sounds obvious, but Gartner frames it carefully. The first question isn't "what can this tool do?" but rather "which SOC functions does your organization handle today that are repetitive time sinks of limited value in improving threat detection, investigation, and response?"

A tool might demonstrate impressive capabilities in a demo environment while addressing workflows your team has already solved through other means. The evaluation should start with your operational bottlenecks, not the vendor's feature list.

... continue reading