Every security team today faces questions regarding its strategy for using artificial intelligence. However, a much simpler question that is often ignored is this: does the organization know what is in its infrastructure? The board of directors requires to know how quickly the radius of an incident can be determined and how to recover from it. Answering such questions is impossible if the data you possess is unreliable.
This is a topic repeatedly raised by CEO Joe Diamond: artificial intelligence can only be as good as the information underlying it.
Most organizations lack a complete view of their environment
Most IT and security teams already struggle with inventory management. Spreadsheets become outdated the moment they are saved. Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) record what IT deems necessary, not what is actually present. In our estimation, the average Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) sees only 40%–50% of their environment. The rest remains 'dark matter': unknown devices and unmanaged assets, as well as records that no one has reconciled for months.
The situation was manageable as long as employees stayed informed. A good security analyst will question a 98% coverage metric, whereas an AI agent will not. It operates based on provided data, and an AI agent without context is not intelligent; it confidently errs.
AI also widens this gap from the other side. Employees can access AI services in seconds and potentially send corporate data to external AI models. Unauthorized use of technology has never been so easy.
AI agents represent a new class of assets
AI agents are emerging at a scale comparable to the internet, and they require tracking as a separate asset class, whether they operate for five minutes or five months. The first step is discovering these agents. Then, it is necessary to determine what they have access to and what actions are permitted: which cloud applications they can connect to, which endpoints they affect, and what permissions they hold.
What intelligent asset management offers
The same three problems manifest in almost all environments: untrustworthy inventories. Gaps in control, discovered only during an audit or incident, mean that at least 10%–25% of assets often lack even one required control. Vulnerability response is slowed down by manual correlation of data from five or more tools.
Intelligent asset management solves these problems by unifying and correlating data from existing tools into a single reliable picture. We commissioned a Forrester Total Economic Impact study that measured the results for a surveyed organization:
- A sixty percent reduction in time spent maintaining asset inventories, equating to approximately 625 hours per year.
- Discovery of one hundred fifty percent more assets than suggested by the pre-Axonius inventory report.
- A seventy percent acceleration in investigation and prioritization during vulnerability response, plus a 90% saving on other vulnerability management activities.
Clients report similar results. One of our clients in global financial services increased short-term cloud instance coverage from 92% to 99%. A global specialized retailer turned a multi-day company-wide frenzy during an incident into a task completed by one engineer in minutes.
How to make this foundation AI-ready
We recently added two features created specifically for this purpose. The Axonius AI Agent allows you to ask questions about your environment in plain English. For example, you can ask which endpoints do not have an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agent installed or are accessible from the internet. You receive a verified answer in one step instead of investigating in 40 tabs.
The Axonius MCP Server, built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—an open standard for connecting AI tools to data sources—allows your own AI agents to receive trusted asset data from AI tools. People and machines work with the same data.
Where to start
Start with the fundamentals. Any AI initiative built on outdated asset data inherits its blind spots. The strongest business case is built on your own numbers. If you want to see how this looks, contact our distribution partner Solid8 Technologies to conduct a business value assessment with our team at info@solid8.co.za.
About Axonius: Axonius is an intelligent asset management platform for unified security operations and exposure management. The Axonius asset cloud is a single source of truth for asset and risk information across the entire organizational environment, providing all the necessary context for risk prioritization and remediation coordination. Axonius is recognized as one of the fastest-growing startups in cybersecurity, having received awards from CNBC, Forbes, and Fortune. Axonius supports millions of assets for leading clients in various industries worldwide. The ability to transform intelligent asset management into intelligent action.