Revisiting Moats VI: The lag between AI spend and Security AI spend; and when to look for an inflection

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Revisiting Moats VI: The lag between AI spend and Security AI spend; and when to look for an inflection

Equity Research

21 July 2026 | 6:49AM EDT

AMERICAS TECHNOLOGY: SOFTWARE

Revisiting Moats VI: The lag between AI spend and Security AI spend;

and when to look for an inflection

In the last four months, the Security category has shifted from being viewed as Gabriela Borges, CFA

+1(212)902-7839 |

at risk from AI to being a clear beneficiary, with the consensus view being: more gabriela.borges@gs.com

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC

AI spend means more Security spend, and this incremental Security budget is

Max Gamperllikely to largely accrue to today’s platform leaders. We agree with this view; +1(415)249-7311 |

however, quantification and timing will matter to realizing alpha from here: max.gamperl@gs.comGoldman Sachs & Co. LLC

Praachi Arora

1. To date, we have yet to see a meaningful change in Security budgets for +1(332)245-7970 |

praachi.arora@gs.com

product. This creates a challenging set up into earnings because stocks have Goldman Sachs India SPL

pre-traded a medium-term inflection. Our industry discussions suggest that

enterprise agentic implementations are still immature and often run in isolated

“sandbox” environments. While many security teams have a “blank check”

strategic mandate, these incremental dollars today are being spent on more

niche product POCs and on patching and hygiene management, which are not

directly monetized in scale by the product companies in our coverage.

2. The question then becomes: when will the publicly-traded security

companies see a more meaningful inflection in fundamentals? As a starting

point, we take a look at the cloud cycle: it took 5 years for Security to inflect from

<1% of cloud to spend to 2-5%, which we view as steady state.