Page 303 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

The Role of Agentic AI in Proactive Cyber Threat Hunting

By Nivedita Kumari, Data & AI Customer Engineer, Google

As cyber threats continue to evolve and grow more persistent and sophisticated, simply applying tools
and technologies to respond to previous attacks is no longer enough. Organizations have to move away
from defensive strategies and proactively define threats that could already be lurking unnoticed in their
environments. In this context, agentic AI is being identified as a transformative tool for the practice of
cyber threat hunting.

Understanding Agentic AI in Cybersecurity

Agentic AI refers to systems that enable artificial intelligence (AI) to autonomously observe their
environment, act, and make decisions to achieve a predetermined goal. Agentic AI can be deployed
within networks and systems, permitting the AI agents to monitor activities in order to analyze data and
actively hunt for dormant or emerging threats without the need for sustained human oversight.

Agentic AI is the first form of artificial intelligence that is not bound to rule-based systems or supervised
models that are defined by pre-established heuristics and labeled examples. They have the ability to
learn and adapt to new threats in real time and are able to detect nuanced anomalies and indicators of
compromise (IOCs) that can be overlooked by other security tools or human experts.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 303
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