Organizations, especially security teams, are not just going to go with a recommendation from an AI platform. An Intelligent Simulation that shows what will happen, why, and how gives security teams the confidence that what they are looking at is feasible and needs to be addressed. This is why it is so critical to the adoption and effective implementation of AI.

In a new report, Gartner has identified Intelligent Simulation as a top disruptor and states “Without intelligent simulation, AI at scale will fail.” The report goes on to say, “By 2030, IS supremacy will be used by 20% of organizations as the main competitive differentiator in AI adoption. IS will become the backbone of all human and machine decision making.”

Skyhawk Security was named as a Sample Vendor in the report. Skyhawk Security’s AI-based Purple Team has leveraged Intelligent Simulation in a Digital Twin environment to identify the weaponized vulnerabilities in your cloud that are most likely to lead to a breach. Skyhawk takes this one step further with business context, prioritizing these vulnerabilities based on the business value of the at-risk asset. This is a vision we not only share but have built our entire platform around. For years, Skyhawk has pioneered the use of an AI-based Purple Team to provide an adversarial view of cloud risk. We believe, the report validates this approach, providing a clear framework for why this technology is no longer a “nice to have,” but a fundamental necessity for any organization operating in the cloud.

The End of Human-Scale Governance

This is especially true in cybersecurity. Threat actors are already leveraging commercial AI to launch Autonomous AI Attacks. Crowdstrike recently published a report with some shocking findings:

  • 89% increase in AI-enabled adversary operations year-over-year
  • 82% of all detections were malware-free as attackers are using legitimate tools
  • Average eCrime breakout time is 29 minutes and the fastest observed was 27 seconds
  • 266% increase in cloud-conscious intrusions by named state-nexus threat actors

 

Threat actors are using AI to create attack campaigns that are faster, more sophisticated, and more persistent than anything human defenders can track. In this new reality, a reactive security posture is a losing strategy. You cannot fight AI-enabled attacks with a human-only defense.

Intelligent Simulation: The Only Viable Path Forward

Skyhawk Security was built on this exact principle:

  • Intelligent Simulation leverages Digital Twin Technology: We create a non-disruptive replica of your live cloud environment, allowing for continuous adversarial testing without operational risk. AI is used to design attack simulations to predict where threat actors will penetrate your cloud, which is then prioritized by the business value of the at-risk asset.
  • Adversarial AI: Our Adversarial AI acts as a continuous red team, simulating how a real attacker would move through your specific cloud architecture to find weaponizable attack paths, providing the evidence the security team needs to understand the exposure and how to fix it.
  • Preemptive Optimization: Gartner uses the term “preemptive optimization” to describe how IS allows organizations to inexpensively simulate scenarios before execution. This is the core of Skyhawk’s “Left of Boom” philosophy — finding and closing security gaps before they can be exploited.

A New Era of Cybersecurity

The report mentions “IS will be used for cybersecurity through attack simulation, exposure management, validation on security controls and scenario planning.”

This is where Skyhawk leads the market. We don’t just show you a list of vulnerabilities; we provide an adversarial view that validates your entire security stack. Our platform continuously answers the questions that matter most:

  • Which of my thousands of alerts represents a real, exploitable threat?
  • Would my existing security controls actually stop an attack on a crown-jewel asset?
  • How would an AI-augmented adversary move through my environment, and what would they target first?

 

We feel that the inclusion of Skyhawk Security in this Gartner research is, for us, powerful validation. The future of cloud security will not be won by the team with the most alerts, but by the team that can most accurately simulate, predict, and preempt the next attack. The era of Intelligent Simulation is here.

Gartner subscribers can read the full report at www.gartner.com.

Gartner, Emerging Tech: AI Vendor Race — Without Intelligent Simulation, AI at Scale Will Fail by Tsuneo Fujiwara, Alfonso Velosa, Evan Brown, Tuong Nguyen, Ethan Cai Initiatives: Technologies and Markets, Published March 6, 2026.

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