Unlocking the Hidden Benefits of AI-Driven Application Security Testing

While Application Security Testing (AST) is crucial for protecting enterprise applications, it presents significant challenges for developers. There are often too many vulnerabilities and not nearly enough time to address them properly. Security teams frequently feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of identified vulnerabilities, many of which are false positives. For instance, NIST found that SAST tools can have a false-positive rate as high as 78% for Java. The OWASP Benchmark shows DAST tools can reach an 82% rate. AI can make a difference in Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) by helping to address these challenges. It goes beyond just identifying vulnerabilities; it effectively adds additional tools for better managing application security throughout the development lifecycle.

Vulnerability Alert Fatigue? Not Anymore

Triage has historically been a mostly manual and time-consuming task prone to human error. AI changes this by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on real-world risk, rather than relying on static CVSS scores. It correlates data from various sources like SAST, DAST, and runtime telemetry. Additionally, it learns from past decisions to enhance accuracy over time. Agentic-AI Triage is faster and smarter, enabling more consistent vulnerability management.

While speed and accuracy are the most obvious benefits, AI-assisted triage offers hidden advantages that amplify its value. It can reduce vulnerability alert fatigue by effectively identifying false positives and grouping related issues, allowing security teams to be more productive. To better understand the impact of staff burnout and turnover, recent surveys indicate that over 70% of DevSecOps teams report experiencing burnout, and 62% of respondents in one survey stated that alert fatigue significantly contributed to staff turnover. To complicate matters, studies have also shown that well over 90% of AppSec alerts are either non-critical or false positives. Understandably, the constant effort required to identify real threats can lead to burnout.

The cost of SecDevOps staff turnover to an organization can be abnormally high due to their specialized role and talent shortages. Losing experienced triage and remediation analysts can raise the risk of a security breach.

Turn Chaos into Clarity—Early Detection of Attack Patterns

Another significant benefit of AI is that it provides clarity. AI can instantly recall historical vulnerability data, which enables faster triage of threats based on severity, exploitability, and business context. AI analysis can also easily apply learned patterns to new findings, ensuring consistency even when team members leave the organization. 

Unlike static vulnerability scoring methods, AI continuously adapts to changing risk contexts and can be trained to factor in new threat intelligence. Additionally, it empowers developers by providing clear remediation guidance to accelerate fixes. And perhaps most importantly, AI can detect subtle correlations across multiple findings that may indicate a systemic weakness or an emerging attack pattern. These are insights that DevSecOps teams might easily miss, given the large amount of information across multiple datasets. Instead of simply waiting for attacks to happen, AI-powered Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) can proactively identify potential attack scenarios across the application landscape, helping teams address risks before they cause real damage. 

AI-driven ASPM is not just about speed; it is also about reducing noise, retaining knowledge, and facilitating continued adaptation. AI enables security teams to make DevOps more proactive and less reactive

Fostering a True Security-first Culture

Every organization would love to have a security-first culture, but few are actually able to do so. AI-based solutions can play a major role by helping teams shift their mindset and embed security without slowing down development. Getting the right balance between speed and security is critical to ultimate success.

So, how do agentic AI capabilities foster a security-first culture? One of the biggest advantages is to alleviate developers from burdensome workloads. Developers nowadays spend too much time poking around for vulnerabilities and writing manual patches. Sifting through scan results to determine what's most worthy of prioritization and fixing is tedious and complex.

Agentic AI is a game-changer. It can manage automated triage, read security scan output, understand and apply business context, and provide accurate, actionable information. This AI-driven process optimizes the entire workflow, enabling teams to identify issues more quickly and focus on delivering high-quality software.

Intelligent Triage for Modern DevSecOps

AI-assisted triage can transform application security from being reactive to proactive by eliminating false positives and prioritizing real threats. Beyond speed and accuracy, its hidden value lies in reducing alert fatigue, preventing burnout, and retaining key knowledge-based team members, even in the face of high staff turnover. 

By learning from historical data and adapting to risks, AI can uncover systemic weaknesses and emerging attack patterns that traditional methods might miss. AI-assisted triage offers an intelligent approach, not only by speeding up remediation but also by fostering a true security-first culture without slowing down the development process.

Learn more about Agentic-AI triage and HCL AppScan RapidFix, or Contact us to set up a demo.