With the Rise of AI Agents, SOC 2 Should Adapt or Risk Irrelevance

Some compliance is mostly for show, and that’s being charitable. You go through it for the website badge, not to find weak spots in your organization. SOC 2 is not like that.

There’s a reason your customers’ procurement teams demand it. They want to know whether they can trust you with their data, and SOC 2 compliance is the accepted way to demonstrate that. It might not be the reason a deal closes, but that deal wouldn’t have closed without it.

We’ve lived “move fast and break things” for so long that we assume disruption must mean breaking stuff by definition. Only when it comes to AI agents, it’s not so easy because of the way they use the existing infrastructure.

Consider an access review row. A production database, 10:03 am, 50 queries under the name of a senior engineer. You were right to approve it; everything conforms accurately to the control. Only that engineer was getting coffee at the time, while their agent was pushing updates to production.