Nominations are open • Enter by February 27, 2027 • Time left: Start a nomination
Award categoryCybersecurity Product / Service
The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards recognize products in which AI agents carry out penetration tests. The category covers AI that plans and runs tests of networks, applications or cloud environments as a human tester would.
Nominations are open
Enter this category by February 27, 2027. Anyone can submit an entry: the company, the nominee, a colleague or an agency.
The AI Penetration Testing category is about AI used to test security, not about testing AI. Typical entries map the target, choose attack paths, chain weaknesses together, try to exploit them within agreed limits and report what an attacker could reach, with evidence and fixes. The aim is to do what a skilled human tester does, more often and across more of the environment, with people setting scope and checking results.
Scheduled, continuous attack simulation fits Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), and testing AI systems themselves fits AI Red Teaming. Penetration testing delivered by human testers as a service fits Pentest-as-a-Service (PtaaS). Since AI drives the testing, the product can be entered in AI-Powered Security Solution as well.
Each category is judged separately, so you can enter a product in every category that matches what it does, with a separate nomination for each. Tailor each nomination to that category's focus. Entering several related categories gives the product more than one chance to be recognized.
An independent jury of security practitioners, analysts and CISOs scores each nomination on leadership, innovation and impact. Each nomination competes in its category against organizations of similar size and region, so a mid-sized firm is not ranked against a global enterprise. Your entry package, any sponsorship and public votes do not affect the jury's scores.
Strong entries in this category show:
The jury awards Gold, Silver or Bronze, or a Finalist badge, and results are published on this site and announced to the 600,000+ member Cybersecurity Insiders community. Every approved nomination also enters the separate Community Choice award, decided by public votes.
A vendor can enter its own product or service, and a PR agency can enter it on a client's behalf. The nomination form has a confidential field for detail that is shared with the judges and not published, such as customer names, deployment figures or roadmap. Deadlines, pricing and entry steps are on the How it Works page.