Purpose-Built AI Agents Will Replace General-Purpose Promises
SC Media, Friday, February 20th, 2026
The AI experimentation phase is over. Organizations spent 2024 and 2025 deploying copilots, testing agents, and letting employees try every AI tool that promised productivity gains.
Some delivered. Many didn't.
Now comes the reckoning, where security teams separate the tools that actually work in production from the ones that just sounded good in demos.
In cybersecurity specifically, we're watching this play out in real time. The vendors who promised autonomous AI would eliminate alert fatigue and run SOC operations overnight created expectations they couldn't meet. That failure doesn't mean AI can't help. It means we learned what actually works. And what works isn't a general-purpose autopilot - it's purpose-built agents designed for specific, measurable tasks within defined workflows.