As the breakneck pace of AI advancement continues, it’s becoming clearer which cybersecurity vendors have an advantage in the area thanks to years of investment, executives at top SentinelOne partners tell CRN.
SentinelOne’s massive push into AI agent security and autonomous SOC is driving strong differentiation for the vendor in an increasingly crowded market—and enabling massive opportunities for partners in services, solution provider executives told CRN.
During interviews this week at SentinelOne’s OneCon 2026 conference, the executives said that as the breakneck pace of AI advancement continues, it’s becoming clearer which cybersecurity vendors have an advantage in the area thanks to years of investment.
[Related: SentinelOne CEO’s 5 Boldest AI Statements At OneCon 2026]
On the other hand, vendors that failed to invest early are at an increasing disadvantage, the solution provider executives said.
Without a doubt, “we’re starting to see this separation,” said Ryan O’Connell, senior vice president for partners and alliances at Leawood, Kan.-based Optiv, No. 29 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2026. “If you weren’t forward-thinking six to nine to 12 months ago, you’re not catching up right now.”
SentinelOne, however, is clearly among the vendors leading the pack, according to solution provider executives. They pointed to SentinelOne’s unveiling this week of a new agentic detection and response offering, as well as an autonomous SOC (Security Operations Center) platform and expanded support for partners building AI security services practices.
In an interview with CRN, SentinelOne co-founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten said the new offerings constitute a “huge advantage” for the vendor and a major differentiator for partners.
For MSSPs and other partners, the highly autonomous systems are “going to radicalize everything they do,” Weingarten said. “That means that they can do more for their customers. They can on-board more customers. They can free up their time to do more important work. And they can create even more business for themselves.”
‘At The Forefront’
Without a doubt, SentinelOne’s AI surge is driving new conversations with customers at solution providers such as GuidePoint Security, according to GuidePoint’s Tristan Tarpinian.
Over time, “they’ve really been able to weave AI into their entire fabric,” said Tarpinian, vice president for national alliances at Herndon, Va.-based GuidePoint, No. 32 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500.
“They are really at the forefront,” she said. “And it’s supporting what our customers need and what we’re hearing from our customers.”
SentinelOne’s announcements at OneCon 2026 cover both AI security itself—with capabilities for protecting organizations from risks introduced by their own agents—as well as enabling security teams to use AI to autonomously investigate and respond to threats.
With the unveiling of Singularity Agentic Detection and Response (ADR), SentinelOne said it is extending its existing capabilities with new behavioral monitoring as well as enhanced protections against unwanted activity by agents. The company also unveiled Singularity ASOC, which brings together AI investigations and autonomous response with security data management and its AI SIEM offering.
Alongside the product launches, SentinelOne signaled that it’s seeking to bring the offerings to market with a continuing reliance on the channel—with the debut of a new AI Security Services partner program providing support for building AI security practices.
The program includes new partner certifications and assessment services, along with enhanced deployment resources around AI security and autonomous SOC, SentinelOne said.
For GuidePoint, which was among the initial launch partners for the AI Security Services program, it’s clear that SentinelOne is enabling partners to meet major customer needs through its latest expansion moves across programs and products, Tarpinian said.
ADR, for instance, is an ideal offering in an environment where customers want fewer tools along with faster detection and response, she said.
Amid high-profile incidents involving AI agents that went astray, customers “want to understand where the agents are, what they’re doing,” Tarpinian said. “They want to be able to detect any bad behavior quickly and respond to it really fast. And so [ADR] puts us in a really good position for that.”
All in all, SentinelOne continues to do “a great job of giving us early access to the [offerings] that we need to be able to take to market with our customers—and really help solve our customers’ complex problems,” she said.
Picking Winners
Amid widespread claims around the industry of being able to use AI and agents to solve cybersecurity challenges, there’s a pressing need to distinguish the vendors that truly can offer highly effective, real-world technology, solution provider executives said.
At Optiv, the question of “who’s innovating”—and who is not—is expected to take on an increasing level of scrutiny going forward given the crowded vendor space and rapid pace of change, according to Optiv’s O’Connell.
“You can look across the stack and see [which vendors are] innovating,” he said. “The picture is really blurry in the marketplace right now. Everybody’s overselling their capabilities.”
A small group of vendors including SentinelOne are offering true “AI-driven platforms” that are on the leading edge of the industry—whereas “when you get into some of those legacy [vendors], they’re still trying to figure out, ‘How does AI come into the mix?’” O’Connell said.
When it comes to real-world deployments, for instance, SentinelOne has already seen more than 5,000 customers utilize its agentic investigation capability, Weingarten said.
The offering—which autonomously investigates alerts and then provides the findings to human analysts—has led investigation times to drop from roughly 50 minutes to about five minutes, which is “incredibly significant,” he said.
Improvements on accuracy over the past year have been a major achievement, enabling the system to be trustworthy to handle more security operations work autonomously, Weingarten said.
Ultimately, “I think we have gotten to the point that we have built a system that can do investigations and detection better than what every human team can do,” he said.
Humans Still Crucial
At the same time, the reality is that human expertise—particularly from partners—remains essential to putting autonomous security into practice in an effective manner, solution provider executives told CRN.
For one thing, customers most definitely still want to know that humans are steering the response to threats, according to Sundhar Annamalai, chief product and strategy officer at LevelBlue, a Dallas-based MSSP and a top SentinelOne service delivery partner.
At this point, customers are very much “not ready to have hands off the wheel,” Annamalai said. “They want people looking [at threats], advising and guiding how to effectively remediate and respond to incidents.”
Without a doubt, this continuing customer demand for expertise points toward the importance of working with vendors such as SentinelOne, which have prioritized enabling partners to deliver services, Optiv’s O’Connell said.
For vendors, “you’ve got to rely on your partners to deliver the service, the implementation,” he said.
There’s no question that as the AI-powered platform from SentinelOne has seen dramatic advancements, it has allowed greater trust that the system is autonomously making the right security decisions, according to GuidePoint’s Tarpinian.
But even as AI-driven security becomes more reliable, she said, “you still need the security team to validate and to keep an eye on things.”
