Every security team is being asked about its AI strategy. Fewer are being asked a simpler question: do you know what’s in your environment? Boards want to know how fast you can find the blast radius of an incident and recover from it. You can’t answer that with data you don’t trust.
It’s a theme our CEO, Joe Diamond, has been talking about in recent interviews: AI is only as good as the ground truth underneath it.
Most organisations can’t see their environment
Most security and IT teams already struggle with inventory. Spreadsheets are out of date the moment they’re saved. Configuration management databases (CMDBs) record what IT thinks should be there, not what is there. We estimate the average chief information security officer (CISO) sees only 40% to 50% of their environment. The rest is dark matter: unknown devices and unmanaged assets, plus records nobody has reconciled in months.
That was manageable when people stayed in the loop. A good security analyst will question a 98% coverage figure. An AI agent won’t. It acts on the data it’s given, and an AI agent without context isn’t intelligent. It’s confidently wrong.
AI widens the gap from the other side too. Employees can reach AI services in seconds and may send corporate data to external AI models. Unauthorised technology use has never been easier.
AI agents are a new asset class
AI agents are arriving at the scale the internet once did, and they need tracking as their own asset class, whether one runs for five minutes or five months.
Finding them is the first step. Next you need to know what they touch and what they’re allowed to do. Which cloud applications can they reach? Which endpoints? What permissions do they hold?
What asset intelligence does about it
The same three problems show up in almost every environment. Inventories nobody trusts. Control gaps that only surface during an audit or an incident, with 10% to 25% of assets often missing at least one required control. Vulnerability response slowed by manual correlation across five or more tools.
Asset intelligence fixes that by consolidating and correlating the data from tools you already own into one trusted picture. A Forrester Total Economic Impact study we commissioned measured the results for a composite organisation.
- Sixty percent less time spent maintaining asset inventories, roughly 625 hours a year
- A hundred and fifty percent more assets identified than the pre-Axonius inventory suggested
- Seventy percent faster investigation and prioritisation in vulnerability response, plus 90% savings on other vulnerability management activities
Customers report similar results. One of our global financial services customers raised coverage of short-lived cloud instances from 92% to 99%. A global specialty retailer turned a multi-day, all-hands scramble during an incident into a task one engineer finished in minutes.
Making that foundation work for AI
We’ve recently added two capabilities built for exactly this.
The Axonius AI Agent lets you ask questions about your environment in plain English. For example, which endpoints have no endpoint detection and response (EDR) agent installed or are exposed to the internet. You get a verified answer in one step, instead of a 40-tab investigation.
The Axonius MCP Server, built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI tools to data sources, lets your own AI agents pull trusted asset data from AI tools. People and machines work from the same data.
Where to start
Start with the foundation. Any AI initiative built on stale asset data inherits its blind spots.
The strongest business case is one built on your own numbers. If you’d like to see what that looks like, speak to our distribution partner, Solid8 Technologies, about a business value assessment with our team at [email protected].
About Axonius
Axonius is the asset intelligence platform for unified security operations and exposure management. The Axonius Asset Cloud is the one source of truth for assets and exposures across an organisation’s entire environment, providing all the right context to prioritise risks and coordinate fixes. Cited as one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity start-ups, with accolades from CNBC, Forbes and Fortune, Axonius supports millions of assets for leading customers across industries and around the world. The power to transform asset intelligence into intelligent action. Learn more at www.axonius.com.
- The author, MB Simon, is chief product officer at Axonius
- Read more articles by Solid8 Technologies on TechCentral
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