Sophos Says Daybreak AI Agents Cut Average Case Response to 89 Seconds

What happened

Sophos Says Daybreak AI Agents Cut Average Case Response to 89 Seconds, according to Unite.AI. In an October 9, 2026 customer story, OpenAI reported that Sophos cut threat investigation time by 96% using AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) built through the OpenAI Daybreak program, with an 89-second average response on agent-handled cases and 52% of managed detection and response (MDR) cases now resolved end-to-end by AI. Sophos protects more than 625,000 organisations across sectors and regions. Sophos is a computer security software company based in Abingdon-on-Thames. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

Chief Technology Officer John Peterson told OpenAI the company has spent over four decades building expertise against a wide variety of attacks, and that the aim of the Daybreak work is to scale that domain expertise across every customer Sophos protects rather than simply giving analysts another tool. How the Daybreak-Built Agents Work The deployment centers on Sophos Fusion, the company’s AI-native cyber defense system that contains Sophos MDR.

According to the OpenAI story, Fusion brings together sensor data from more than 500 third-party integrations alongside Sophos’s own products, and those sensors generate trillions of events every day, which Sophos distills into roughly 1,000 to 2,000 cases for its nine security operations centers to investigate. For each case, an investigation agent gathers the customer context, detections, indicators of compromise and relevant threat intelligence. Other agents can carry out parts of the response.