The time for AI experimentation is over. In 2026, corporate security teams – like all other business divisions – will need to prioritize integrating AI that actually delivers on promised business value.
AI products specifically designed for the corporate security industry are transforming how organizations keep their employees safe, facilities protected, and respond to revenue-impacting events. Security teams that shy away from AI or invest in underperforming products will quickly fall behind, as AI agents redefine what proactive risk management means and how security teams operate.
Here are my top corporate security predictions for 2026
Prediction 1: AI Goes Mainstream in Corporate Security
In 2026, corporate security teams will evolve from AI experimentation to integrating AI into daily processes and workflows.
Expectations from leadership and other business units will push security teams to move beyond AI hype to solutions that deliver substantive AI value. Chief Security Officers (CSOs) will increasingly look for technologies that help automate and semi-automate internal workflows, and make their teams more efficient and effective. Security teams will need to consider how they can “rewire” practices for a fundamental shift in security strategy.
Purpose-built AI agents will replace generic AI solutions to more effectively address specific use cases and business needs. Security leaders will prioritize AI that enables their internal specialists to focus on more strategically valuable work.
Prediction 2: Buyers Will Expect True Value from AI Products (and Say Goodbye to Low-Quality Tools)
In 2026, companies will be able to better identify AI platforms that deliver value.
The rush to capitalize on AI-hype flooded the market with AI-washed products, big promises, and, ultimately, a shortfall in delivering meaningful value. Today’s security teams are finding that platforms where AI is sprinkled in, rather than purposely built to solve specific challenges, are not meeting the needs of their organization.
In 2026, corporate security teams will increasingly turn to vendors who are fine tuning their own models, and building AI agents that solve real pain points in the industry, over companies integrating AI for the sake of AI.
Moving forward, buyers will become more savvy when buying AI solutions. They’ll increasingly be able to spot vendors who lack the technical expertise and internal experience to create solutions that will drive the outcomes they’re looking for.
Prediction 3: Third-Party Breaches Will Drive Cross-Domain Incidents
In 2026, third-party vulnerabilities will become the main driver of cyber-physical incidents.
Cross-domain threats, which are threats that originate in one domain and present risk in another, can create major blind spots for ill-prepared organizations. This remains a particular challenge for organizations with heavily siloed physical and cyber security teams, or those with ineffective cross-team communication.
Though the expanding risk landscape has been a longstanding concern, organizations are increasingly vulnerable, as they continue to rely heavily on external vendors for critical operations. Third parties remain a potential weak link for organizations, which often lack insight into the maturity and resilience of their third-party’s cybersecurity posture.
As seen in 2025, third-party cyber breaches can have significant real-world impacts on an organization’s facilities, operations and ability to generate revenue. For example, an attack that takes down a third-party payment system may impact physical sales in brick and mortar stores or a breach at a marketing agency could derail digital signage at a sports event.
Learn More: Dataminr Guide to the Expanding Risk Landscape
Prediction 4: Real-Time Personalized Intelligence Will Arrive
In 2026, a new form of intelligence will emerge which enables organizations to mitigate and respond to security events more quickly and efficiently.
Today’s organizations rely heavily on open-source information, but the immense volume and velocity of public data means that AI is the only way to identify emerging risks and critical information.
In 2026, security teams will see a new type of intelligence emerge that fuses publicly available data with a company’s own internal data in real-time. This intelligence is context-aware, personalized, and automatically adapts to the unique needs of individual customers. This new era of client-tailored intelligence will enable companies to anticipate, detect, and mitigate security incidents before they even happen.
Looking Forward
Over the next year, security teams will continue to wade through a deluge of products with lofty AI promises that fail to deliver. Strategic leaders will understand that investing in effective AI solutions will transform how the security department operates, especially related to threat detection and mitigation. Security teams should continue to carefully select and integrate AI that drives business value and offers true assistance to the team.
Dataminr Guide to the Expanding Risk Landscape
We are witnessing a fundamental transformation in the nature of risk, moving beyond predictable patterns to a reality defined by accelerating volatility and a blurring of traditional boundaries across both physical and cyber domains. This new environment demands a radical rethinking of how organizations identify, understand, and respond to threats coming from everywhere at once.
Learn more
