Autonomous Security Agents Require Complete Data: Is Yours Ready?

An endpoint agent cannot report its own absence. The 2026 Axonius Actionability Report, conducted with the Ponemon Institute and surveying 662 IT and security professionals, put a number on a gap SOC teams have worked around for years. Across the Axonius customer base, 12.7% of devices in a 298,000-device median inventory are missing their expected security agent.

If a device has no agent, no management console shows it. If a CMDB record is stale, no reconciliation flags it. An employee who installed Claude Enterprise outside procurement created a SaaS workspace, identity surface, and API-token footprint that endpoint telemetry alone will not reliably inventory.

The coverage percentage on the EDR dashboard is structurally incomplete because the reporting mechanism cannot see what it does not cover. That gap matters more now than it did six months ago. SOC and XDR vendors are pushing more autonomous investigation and remediation into production.

Those agents will query the same dashboards, trust the same coverage percentages, and act on the same blind spots human analysts learned to work around. A human analyst second-guesses a 98% coverage number. An autonomous agent treats it as ground truth and moves at machine speed.

Three independent signals converged on the same gap. Gravitee’s 2026 survey of 900-plus executives found 88% reported confirmed or suspected AI-related incidents, and only 14.4% sent agents live with full security approval. The Axonius/Ponemon report found 52% of respondents would let autonomous agents act on recommendations — while 63% said the underlying data lacks important information.

The CSA's Agentic Trust Framework requires verified data governance before agents act on any finding. Mike Riemer, Field CISO at Ivanti, said that known vulnerabilities on Azure’s honeypot networks are now attacked in under 90 seconds. “Traditional security measures continue to work,” Riemer told VentureBeat.

The caveat is that those measures only protect what they can see. An EDR agent deployed across 87.3% of the device inventory leaves the remaining 12.7% outside that agent’s telemetry, policy enforcement, and detection logic. Exclusive deployment data quantifies the scale.

Joe Diamond, CEO of Axonius, told VentureBeat that the average CISO sees roughly 50% of what is actually on the network. “Say 50% of their environment is sitting in dark matter,” Diamond said. “They don’t know what it is, or where it is, or who has access to it, if it’s secure, if it’s not secure.” Deployment data from more than 900 Axonius customers confirms those numbers.

TransUnion went from 70% to 99% endpoint coverage after out-of-band verification. Western Union went from 85% to 99% by consolidating data from 38 tools and cutting manual workload by half. Lumen discovered 1.1 million assets, where the CMDB showed 17,000.