RSA 2026 Key Takeaways

The RSA Conference once again demonstrated its commanding presence as the preeminent event within the cybersecurity ecosystem, with meetings and various gatherings extending far beyond the show floor into hotels, coffee shops, and restaurants throughout San Francisco. Our team had another highly productive week and a broad range of insightful conversations with emerging cybersecurity companies, large security platform vendors and sector-focused investors. While AI dominated the conversation again this year, our sense was that the vendor ecosystem is now more closely honing in on the specific capabilities required to secure AI environments and “fight AI with AI”. Below are some additional observations from our conversations during the week: 

Security for AI vs. AI for Security (continued) 

• Security for AI once again dominated the discussions, but this year with a greater emphasis on securing and controlling agents — with emerging pure-plays rapidly developing agentic solutions and established AI security vendors pivoting to add agentic capabilities. Many of these companies are running ahead of actual enterprise adoption, with meaningful agent deployment still as much as six to nine months away according to some participants we connected with enable AI to be deployed securely with enterprise organizations, and the increasing implementation of AI within cybersecurity solutions. 

• In addition, the industry is aggressively looking to leverage AI itself to secure organizations from a continuously evolving and AI-driven threat landscape, including introducing agents which can automate security workflows and potentially take security-driven actions themselves.
• As we predicted in our takeaways from RSA last year, 2025 proved to be a landmark year for consolidation in the AI security space, with most of the large public cybersecurity vendors moving decisively to acquire best-in-class technology and talent needed to lead AI security initiatives. We expect this activity to continue throughout 2026, as new acquirers enter the AI security arena and established players look to build upon existing foundations and extend into agentic solutions. 

AI SOC Shifts the Landscape for MDR Solutions

• A particular use case we saw gaining substantial traction was AI SOC, as AI is increasingly capable of equipping security teams with the data and context needed to act faster and more decisively, and in some cases push towards making autonomous decisions as well.   

• Many companies today leverage third-party Managed Detection & Response (“MDR”) solutions with relatively low switching costs, making them natural candidates to migrate toward more cost-efficient and increasingly automated AI SOC solutions. 

• As a result, both incumbent platform vendors and emerging players are chasing the AI SOC opportunity, which we expect to drive additional consolidation activity in the days ahead. 

Continued Importance of Identity Security 

• Identity remained a prominent theme this year, particularly as enterprises explore agentic AI adoption. Non-human identities have emerged as a key focus area, with organizations increasingly assigning identities to devices, servers, and applications as they ultimately look to securely provision access and authorization to agents.   

• As agentic access to infrastructure resources represents a clear emerging risk to IT organizations, a new class of identity access control, authorization, and authentication solutions has emerged, which we expect will generate continued strategic interest in the identity security sector for the foreseeable future. 

Ongoing Momentum in Cyber M&A Activity 

• Despite a backdrop of continued macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, most industry participants remain focused on executing their strategic roadmaps as quickly as possible to stay ahead of both the competition and an ever-expanding threat landscape.   

• According to industry sources, 2025 was the strongest year for Cybersecurity M&A since 2021 and arguably ever. Despite public market uncertainly associated with the “SaaS apocalypse” and renewed conflict in the Middle East, we expect cybersecurity acquirers to remain active on the M&A front in 2026, driven by the rapid pace of development by emerging AI startups — and the risk of being left behind if they don’t. 

We look forward to following up and trading notes on RSA with participants across the cybersecurity ecosystem in the coming days.