The Architecture of Agentic Defense: Inside the Falcon Platform

The architectural divide in cybersecurity is no longer theoretical. It's operational. Adversaries are deploying AI-accelerated attacks and moving laterally across domains faster than human analysts can correlate evidence. Meanwhile, defenders are adopting AI tools that accelerate individual tasks but still operate on fragmented data and require manual correlation across disconnected systems.

The result is a widening capability gap: not between those using AI and those who aren't, but between defenders with architectures built for agentic security operations and those bolting AI onto platforms designed for human-driven workflows. When a security stack requires analysts to manually query five systems, translate between vendor schemas, and correlate findings across disparate tools, adding an AI chatbot doesn't solve the structural problem. 

The question isn't whether to adopt AI in security operations. It's whether the platform architecture can support AI agents that reason across unified intelligence, coordinate multi-domain responses, and operate at adversary speed. Modern security operations require an architecture where data, semantic meaning, and AI-driven processes operate as an integrated system. This demands four core capabilities: 

• Semantic unification across heterogeneous data sources

• Autonomous reasoning that operationalizes domain expertise

• Adaptive coordination of multi-agent workflows

• Governed execution with full policy enforcement and traceability

These capabilities form the backbone of the Agentic SOC, in which human expertise directs AI agents that reason, decide, and act at machine speed across a unified context. They are also built into CrowdStrike’s Enterprise Graph, Charlotte AI expert agents, Charlotte AI AgentWorks, and Charlotte Agentic SOAR.

Since its founding in 2011, CrowdStrike has pioneered the use of AI and machine learning in cybersecurity. In this blog, we provide an overview of how these CrowdStrike technologies work, their role in powering the agentic SOC, and how they set the foundation for more adaptive, autonomous security operations as agentic defense continues to mature.

Enterprise Graph: Unified Intelligence Across Fragmented Data

Enterprise environments generate heterogeneous telemetry from endpoints, identities, cloud workloads, applications, and network infrastructure. Each domain exposes data through different schemas, semantics, and access patterns, creating structural fragmentation that complicates correlation and prevents AI systems from performing reliable cross-domain reasoning. When investigating threats, security teams often manually query multiple data stores, translate between vendor-specific schemas, and correlate results across disparate systems. A single investigation can require interactions with five or more systems, each with different query languages, APIs, and domain-specific expertise requirements.

Enterprise Graph, a real-time data layer that unifies and contextualizes across security domains, will address this through an architectural principle: No single data store excels at every workload. The CrowdStrike Falcon platform employs several specialized data stores, each optimized for specific analytical requirements. Graph systems enable deep hierarchical traversals for process relationships and behavioral analytics. Time-series systems capture state changes, configuration shifts, and connectivity patterns. Search systems provide schema-agnostic exploration across full-fidelity telemetry. Enterprise Graph will provide a common abstraction layer for these data stores while preserving specialized performance characteristics.

This architecture spans CrowdStrike Threat Graph, Asset Graph, Risk Graph, Intel Graph, and CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale®, unified through four core components. The Semantic Data Model provides universal translation, mapping heterogeneous schemas to consistent conceptual definitions. The Global Query Engine delivers federated execution by determining the appropriate data stores and using CrowdStrike Query Language (C-Query) as an abstraction layer to transform or pass through queries, while returning cohesive results. The Global Command Engine enables governed action, translating intent into native API calls with full audit trails.

Looking at the future of Enterprise Graph, CrowdStrike is working toward creating a real-time digital twin of the enterprise: a continuously updated representation where both human expertise and AI-driven reasoning operate on shared intelligence. Once achieved, this digital twin will enable security teams to understand current state, simulate potential changes, and assess implications before taking action, transforming investigation workflows that previously required hours into analysis completed in minutes.

Expert Agents: Native AI Reasoning Across the Falcon Platform

While Enterprise Graph will provide the Falcon platform with a consolidated data fabric and semantic abstraction layer, Charlotte AI expert agents operationalize this intelligence with native, mission-ready capabilities such as Detection Triage, Guided Investigation, Natural Language Search, Malware Analysis, Promptbooks, and Workflow Automation. These agents operate as distributed reasoning processes correlating integrated telemetry, performing cross-domain analysis, and executing policy-enforced actions across endpoint, identity, and cloud systems.

Effective threat triage requires correlating evidence across endpoints, identities, vulnerabilities, and threat intelligence while applying consistent analytical frameworks to thousands of daily detections. Manual analysis cannot maintain this rigor at scale. The same detection evaluated under different operational conditions produces different outcomes. Critical threats slip through when processes cannot keep pace with detection volume.

Traditional automation frameworks rely on static, rule-bound workflows that trigger based on predefined conditions. Charlotte AI expert agents introduce AI systems designed to reason, decide, and act. Each is instructed to perform specialized tasks, operating as domain-specific inference engines. Because all telemetry, semantics, and state representations reside within a single unified architectural framework, these agents operate with consistent inputs, predictable behavior, and explainable decision paths.

What distinguishes Charlotte AI expert agents from conventional automation is their reasoning approach. Rather than reacting to single signals, they will construct evidence-backed judgments by simultaneously evaluating process lineage, identity context, environmental indicators, adversary tradecraft, and exposure paths. As correlation capabilities expand through Enterprise Graph, behavioral detections will be enriched by querying Asset Graph for affected systems and associated identities, Intel Graph for adversary intelligence, Threat Graph for process lineage and behavioral patterns, and Risk Graph and Falcon LogScale for environmental factors.

Based on aggregated evidence, detections are classified with risk scores assigned to prioritize appropriate response actions. This comprehensive analysis executes in milliseconds across all detections and environments. Charlotte AI expert agents span the entire operational lifecycle including detection triage, investigation, exposure management, malware analysis, threat hunting, detection engineering, and data operations.

The result is deterministic reasoning at scale. Each agent executes the same correlation logic, threat intelligence enrichment, and evidence evaluation across every detection, eliminating the analytical variance inherent in manual triage. Analysts can operate with consistent, expert-level reasoning backing every decision, 24/7, while focusing their expertise on high-value judgments that require human context and strategic thinking.

Custom Agents with Charlotte AI AgentWorks: Tailoring Intelligence to Your Environment

Organizations have unique requirements that generic tools cannot address. Charlotte AI AgentWorks will extend the Falcon platform's reasoning architecture, allowing teams to build custom agents operating under the same governance and execution model as the platform’s native Charlotte AI expert agents.

Every organization operates with distinct security requirements shaped by industry regulations, operational workflows, and threat models. Healthcare organizations monitor protected health information (PHI) access patterns and medical device interactions. Financial services track privileged trading activity and transaction anomalies. Manufacturing environments correlate OT and IT telemetry across air-gapped networks. Defense organizations assess security architecture posture against classified threat intelligence. Off-the-shelf agents were not designed to encode these sector-specific policies, compliance requirements, or operational contexts.

Traditional customization approaches force a choice between flexibility and governance. Custom scripts operate outside security platforms with no audit trails or policy enforcement. Low-code tools provide limited reasoning capabilities constrained by predefined logic blocks. Organizations need agents that understand their specific environment without creating governance gaps or operational silos.

We're building AgentWorks on a different premise: that custom reasoning should be a first-class capability, not a workaround. Teams will define reasoning logic in plain language or structured specifications. Custom agents will follow a managed lifecycle including sandbox validation, administrative authorization, and production execution under RBAC policies with full audit trails and policy enforcement.

Compliance requirements that today depend on periodic manual reviews will execute as continuous autonomous checks. Threat patterns unique to an environment will trigger investigation workflows automatically. Security policies that currently require analyst interpretation will operate as auditable agent decisions.

The question isn't whether organizations need custom security logic. Every regulated industry, operational environment, and threat model demands it. The question is whether that custom logic operates within the security architecture or outside it.

Charlotte Agentic SOAR: Coordinated Action Through Agentic Orchestration

Modern adversaries move laterally, adapt techniques mid-attack, and exploit gaps between disconnected security controls. Traditional SOAR promised to automate response but delivered predetermined sequences that struggle to adapt to evolving threats. Playbooks define fixed actions with predetermined decision points. When a detection fires, the system executes the corresponding workflow regardless of how the attack unfolds. Manual approval gates create delays across all responses, whether the threat is a confirmed breach or a false positive. The fundamental limitation is architectural: Response logic is defined at design time based on anticipated attack patterns, not constructed at runtime based on actual threat behavior.

Charlotte Agentic SOAR operates on a different architectural principle: Response logic should be constructed from evidence, not selected from templates. When threats are detected, the orchestration layer queries unified telemetry for complete context, invokes specialized agents to evaluate evidence, and builds response sequences based on findings. This architecture combines CrowdStrike Falcon® Fusion SOAR's workflow engine with Charlotte AI's reasoning capabilities and AgentWorks' custom agent framework. 

This architectural shift eliminates the core tradeoff in traditional SOAR. Organizations no longer choose between speed through full automation or control through manual gates at every step. Approval gates become conditional controls triggered by risk thresholds and asset criticality. Defense processes adapt to adversary behavior while maintaining governance through RBAC-enforced authorization, comprehensive audit trails, and policy controls. As adversaries continue to evolve tactics faster than playbooks can be updated, the architectural gap between static and adaptive orchestration will define which organizations can respond effectively and which remain constrained by response logic designed for yesterday's threats.

The Living Architecture of Agentic Defense

The Falcon platform is establishing a living architectural foundation where data, reasoning, and orchestration will function as a unified, evolving system. Enterprise Graph will normalize fragmented telemetry and provide federated access across specialized data stores, creating a real-time digital twin that reflects the current state of the enterprise. Charlotte AI expert agents apply reasoning frameworks that execute continuous analysis and response with consistent logic, while custom AI agents being developed through Charlotte AgentWorks will extend these capabilities with organization-specific intelligence. Charlotte Agentic SOAR coordinates these capabilities into adaptive workflows that adjust to threat conditions in real time, responding to adversary behavior as it unfolds.

This living architecture will operate through continuous feedback loops. As new telemetry enters the platform, it will be normalized and integrated into the unified model through Enterprise Graph. This will unlock the ability for agents to reason over evolving context and apply frameworks that reflect both current enterprise state and observed adversary tradecraft. Orchestration layers will adjust workflow execution based on live analysis, while the architecture remains stable in its governance model even as it adapts dynamically to operational conditions.

The result is an architectural model that enables consistent, governed, and scalable defense without sacrificing adaptability. The Falcon platform provides scalable interfaces, strong policy enforcement, and end-to-end auditability, with expanding capabilities that will enable organizations to maintain operational stability while responding to evolving adversary tradecraft. Humans, agents, and integrated systems operate with shared context and predictable behavior throughout the defense lifecycle, creating a foundation that is both resilient in structure and adaptive in execution.

Additional Resources

• Read this blog: Inside CrowdStrike’s Science-Backed Approach to Building Expert SOC Agents
• Hear from CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz: The Dawn of the Agentic SOC: Reimagining Cybersecurity for the AI Era
• Learn more about the Falcon platform.
• Visit the Charlotte AI webpage.
• Explore Charlotte Agentic SOAR.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog includes descriptions of products, features, or functionality that may not be currently generally available. Any such references are provided for information purposes only. The development, release, and timing of all features or functionality remain at CrowdStrike’s sole discretion and may change without notice. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. Customers should make purchasing decisions based only on services and features that are currently generally available.