The 2026 Exposure Management Shift: What Security Leaders Need to Know
by Brinqa, Security Experts//10 min read/
As security leaders plan for 2026, exposure management is undergoing a meaningful shift. The conversation is moving beyond visibility and volume toward something more fundamental: how confidently teams can understand risk, act on it, and explain those decisions to leadership.
In a recent discussion with Brad Hibbert (CSO & COO, Brinqa), Erik Helms (CRO, Brinqa), and Ken Ricketts (CISO in Residence, Insight Partners), three themes emerged as especially important for the year ahead: practical AI, trust, and data confidence. Together, these themes help explain not only where exposure management is headed, but why many programs struggle to turn insight into action today.
Exposure management in 2026 is shifting from visibility to confidence. Programs must govern AI, close ownership gaps, and rely on trusted data to reduce risk and communicate progress.
So what’s driving this change? Across the industry, analysts and security leaders are seeing the same patterns emerge. The predictions below highlight the trends that will define exposure management in 2026 — and why they matter now.
Part One: The Predictions Shaping Exposure Management in 2026
1. AI Becomes Practical, Governed, and Explainable
AI investment is continuing to move forward – but with greater scrutiny. While some experimentation is being slowed, Forrester notes that roughly 25% of AI spending will be delayed into 2027 while companies focus on proving ROI. The message is clear: AI must earn its place in security operations.
AI is already influencing how risk is prioritized, analyzed, and communicated. But usefulness matters more than novelty. As Brad Hibbert explained:
“AI and automation is not going to fix bad data. It’s going to amplify bad data, and it’s going to get you doing the wrong things faster.”
For AI to be practical in 2026, it must be governed, transparent, and grounded in trusted inputs. Otherwise, it accelerates noise rather than reducing risk.
“AI and automation is not going to fix bad data. It’s going to amplify bad data, and it’s going to get you doing the wrong things faster.”
Brad Hibbert, CSO & COO, Brinqa
2. Trust Becomes the New Security Metric
Trust surfaced as one of the most consistent, and revealing, themes in the discussion. Not trust in tools alone, but trust between teams, in ownership, and in the information used to make decisions.
That reality was reinforced by a live audience poll during the session. When attendees were asked to identify the biggest gap in their exposure management programs, 100% selected ownership.
The result underscored a broader point: visibility isn’t the problem. Alignment is.
Erik Helms framed trust as a structural challenge for large organizations:
“When you get into large organizations and automation starts to scale the risk, the loss of trust is potentially a new security failure.”
Ownership gaps erode trust at every level. When responsibility isn’t clear — or shifts across security, engineering, and operations — decision-making slows and accountability weakens.
Brad Hibbert echoed this from customer conversations:
“Finding the owner, friction between the security team and the remediation teams, has come up quite a bit in the last six months or so.”
In 2026, trust won’t be a soft indicator of maturity. It will be a measurable signal of whether exposure management programs can consistently drive action.
When attendees were asked to identify the biggest gap in their exposure management programs, 100% selected ownership.
3. Resilience Will Depend on Data Confidence
If trust is the outcome, data confidence is the foundation.
Data confidence is increasingly tied to regulatory and financial risk. Gartner predicts that by 2029, organizations that fail to verify the integrity of their digital assets could face billion-dollar sanctions.
This raises the bar for exposure management. It’s no longer enough to identify risk – organizations must be able to validate what’s real, confirm what’s been remediated, and demonstrate integrity across assets, data, and AI-driven decisions.
“Large language models are uniquely good at unlocking data we’ve never had access to, but we’ve got to be able to believe that we can count on it.”
Ken Ricketts, CISO in Residence, Insight Partners
Exposure management programs are inherently data-driven, and without confidence in that data, even well-intentioned efforts fall apart. Hibbert emphasized this clearly:
“Exposure management programs are data-driven programs, and you have to have a strong data foundation that you can build off of.”
Ken Ricketts added a CISO’s perspective as AI becomes more embedded in security workflows:
“Large language models are uniquely good at unlocking data we’ve never had access to, but we’ve got to be able to believe that we can count on it.”
Resilience in 2026 isn’t just about absorbing attacks. It’s about knowing what’s real, what’s been addressed, and whether risk has actually changed.
From Industry Shifts to Board Expectations
These three shifts, practical AI, trust as a security metric, and data confidence, reflect what analysts are telling us about where exposure management is headed.
But for security leaders, the real test comes at a different level.
As the discussion made clear, boards aren’t asking about tools or tactics. They’re asking more fundamental questions:
- Are you solving for advanced persistent threats?
- Are you surfacing emerging risk early, before it becomes material?
- Are you reducing the cost and complexity of security?
- Are you improving governance and compliance in a measurable way?
Exposure management is where all of these questions come together. It’s the connective tissue between technical risk and business outcomes — and the lens through which leaders are increasingly expected to demonstrate progress.
That’s why the next part of the conversation focused on a practical, five-step playbook designed to help security teams build a data-driven exposure management blueprint for the year ahead.
Ken Ricketts, CISO in Residence, Insight Partners
Part Two: Turning Insight into Action with an Exposure Management Playbook
Predictions matter, but they only help if teams can operationalize them. The second half of the discussion focused on how security leaders can translate these shifts into a more effective exposure management approach — one that directly addresses the ownership gap surfaced by the audience poll.
The conversation anchored on a five-step exposure management playbook, designed for the realities of 2026, where AI is practical, trust is measurable, and data confidence underpins resilience.
The five steps security leaders should focus on:
1. Establish a trusted foundation of assets and data
Before AI or automation can be effective, teams need a reliable, unified understanding of what exists in their environment — including cloud assets, identities, and AI-generated infrastructure.
2. Align ownership and accountability across teams
The poll result made this clear: ownership is the most persistent challenge in exposure management today. Clarifying responsibility — and aligning it across security and remediation teams — is foundational to rebuilding trust and driving action.
3. Apply context to prioritize what matters most
As AI becomes more practical, prioritization must also be explainable. Context — business impact, asset criticality, threat likelihood — helps teams understand why something matters and who should act.
4. Drive action and close the loop
Visibility alone doesn’t reduce risk. Effective exposure management ensures issues are addressed by the right owners and that remediation is verified, reinforcing confidence that risk is actually changing.
5. Communicate outcomes with confidence
Exposure management must translate into outcomes leaders care about. As Erik Helms noted:
“Executives and boards don’t fund technologies and efforts. They’re looking to fund outcomes.”
Clear, data-backed communication strengthens trust and demonstrates progress in terms the business understands.
Looking Ahead
The shift underway in exposure management isn’t about adding more tools or generating more signals. It’s about operating with confidence: in AI-supported decisions, in the data behind them, and in the teams responsible for acting.
The webinar offered a simple but powerful reminder: until ownership is clear, even the best insights struggle to turn into outcomes.
For security leaders, 2026 will reward programs that align trust, data, and action into a coherent story – one that holds up internally and externally. Exposure management sits at the center of that story, and how it evolves over the next year will shape how organizations understand and reduce risk.
Build a stronger, smarter exposure management strategy.
Whether you’re looking to improve visibility, streamline remediation, or modernize your approach with AI, the Brinqa Expert team will help you uncover practical next steps tailored to your environment.
Schedule a complimentary 30-minute strategy session with Brinqa experts to evaluate your current exposure management program and identify opportunities to strengthen it.
