Our AI strategy for preemptive security
Earlier this week, Bugcrowd announced our newest early access offering, Savant Pathseeker. Savant Pathseeker is an agentic pentesting solution that allows customers to expand their pentesting coverage across previously ignored applications and APIs in a faster, scalable, more affordable way.
In my career, I’ve seen a lot of evolution in the pentesting space. Traditional pen tests were initially fit for purpose, but often didn’t meaningfully reduce risk or address unknowns. Continuous pentesting delivery methods like Penetration Testing as a Service have expanded the effectiveness of pentesting. Now, agentic offerings are shaking up the industry again.
This blog covers some basic questions and answers about the agentic pentesting space in general.
What are the benefits of using AI to fully automate pentesting?
The main benefits come down to speed and coverage. You can test far more of your estate, far more often, and at a cost that makes it worth testing things that used to get skipped.
Traditionally, manual pentesting was always rationed to once or twice a year, on whatever someone decided mattered most. Automation lifts that constraint for routine, known-pattern work, and it frees your best people up for the harder problems. Human-led testing solves the harder problems and focuses on the crown jewels.
What are the disadvantages to fully automating pentesting?
Early automated solutions are showing high false-negative rates—proof that automation on its own still misses a lot.
Scanners are good at known patterns and weak on the things that take judgment, like business logic or an exploit chain nobody built them to look for.
Automation isn’t the problem, though. The problem is reading a clean automated result as proof you’re secure, when it might just mean the tool didn’t look in the right place. That’s the challenge to address: better validation on what these tools report, and human expertise on what they miss.
What are the advantages of hybrid pentesting, where human expertise supports automated testing?
You get the machine’s breadth and human judgment on the same job. The AI covers ground fast and surfaces a lot. The people find the meaning in the signal, deciding what actually matters, and chaining the exploit a scanner would never put together on its own. They also put a name behind the result, which is what an auditor wants and automated tools currently can’t give.
The human side isn’t a commodity: it’s a crowd paid on the impact it finds, not the hours it books and digs into hard targets differently than someone working a scoped checklist. Point that at what the AI has already mapped, and you’ve got more than an automated scan with a review step stapled on.
Does hybrid pentesting reduce the benefits an organization can gain by fully automated pentesting?
It does not. With a hybrid approach, you don’t give up the speed or the coverage; the automation still runs at full scale. You’re just putting people alongside it who can tell you which findings are real and which gaps actually matter.
The only thing you lose is the false sense of security…which is a good thing!
If you’re interesting in applying for the early access Savant Pathseeker offering, check out the product page to learn more.