CardinalOps Unveils Cardinal AI and Wingman, Bringing Agentic Intelligence to the Front Lines of Cyber Risk Reduction

In the modern SOC, defenders are often buried beneath a chaotic sprawl of alerts, CVEs, and uncorrelated findings from an ever-growing list of security tools. At Black Hat USA 2025, CardinalOps is making a bold pitch to change that narrative—by putting generative AI in the driver’s seat of exposure management.

The cybersecurity firm announced Cardinal AI, a new AI-driven suite designed to unify fragmented threat data and recommend concrete steps for reducing risk across cloud, endpoint, and network environments. At the heart of the release is Wingman, a generative AI interface that acts as both advisor and orchestrator, helping teams sift signal from noise and design mitigation plans with surgical precision.

“Security teams don’t need more data—they need the right data, connected to the right context, and actionable in real time,” said Michael Mumcuoglu, co-founder and CEO of CardinalOps. “With the launch of Cardinal AI and Wingman, we're delivering the next evolution of exposure management: from reactive patching to proactive, AI-assisted remediation.”

From Dashboard Fatigue to Decisive Action

Cardinal AI is built on the company’s Unified Exposure Management platform and is trained to reason across security silos: from vulnerability management (VM) tools and SIEMs, to CSPM and EDR platforms. It uses large language models (LLMs) to align detections with MITRE ATT&CK techniques and drive real-time threat intelligence operations (TI-Ops), mapping TTPs to gaps in existing coverage.

But what sets this apart from a dozen other “AI for security” plays is the operational depth built into Wingman. The tool allows security practitioners to ask natural language questions—like “How should we mitigate CVE-2025-24345 in our AWS infrastructure?”—and receive a prioritized set of compensating controls, implementation plans, and trade-off analysis. Think ChatGPT meets red team advisor meets change management planner.

Wingman doesn’t just suggest mitigations—it can validate those proposed by the user, compare time-to-remediation and control coverage, and even recommend the best plan based on your environment’s asset posture and business impact.

AI Agents With a Mission

The Cardinal AI system employs a new generation of task-specific agents trained on narrow domains—such as endpoint hardening, cloud misconfiguration, and lateral movement prevention. These agents work together to explore mitigation strategies autonomously, weigh remediation paths, and ultimately build action plans that still require human validation before implementation.

The company emphasizes a “human-in-the-loop” model that keeps practitioners in control, while relieving them from the grind of sorting through duplicative findings or debating whether patching or segmentation is more feasible for a given risk.

Reimagining the Remediation Pipeline

Cardinal AI marks a pivot from traditional patch-and-pray strategies toward something more dynamic. Instead of chasing CVEs down a ticketing rabbit hole, Wingman can identify viable compensating controls when patching isn’t feasible, and help teams understand how multiple controls can work in tandem to close exposure gaps.

“With Wingman, teams are no longer forced to choose between coverage and complexity,” Mumcuoglu said. “We’re giving them a trusted co-pilot that’s fast, contextual, and aligned with their actual infrastructure.”

A New AI-Driven Security Stack

As AI continues to redefine cybersecurity, CardinalOps is staking its claim on the frontline of remediation—not by replacing humans, but by amplifying them. With its new agentic approach, the company aims to make exposure management smarter, faster, and—perhaps most importantly—actionable.

Visitors to Black Hat USA 2025 can get a firsthand look at Cardinal AI and Wingman at booth #5821. With escalating threats and expanding attack surfaces, one thing’s certain: the next frontier of cyber defense won’t just be reactive—it’ll be orchestrated. And AI might just be the one calling the plays.