ZEST Releases AI Sweeper Agents

Autonomous Agentic Capability That Eliminates Non-Exploitable Vulnerabilities at Scale

ZEST Security today announced the official release of AI Sweeper Agents, a major new product capability designed to mitigate backlogs by autonomously dismissing vulnerabilities that have no real world exploitability path.

The Problem with Vulnerability Backlogs

Modern security teams are overwhelmed by vulnerability volume. Organizations deploy dozens of security tools including vulnerability scanners, CSPM platforms, SCA solutions and container scanners. Each of these tools generates findings independently, resulting in millions of vulnerabilities tracked across on prem and cloud environments.

Despite continuous investment in automation and prioritization, vulnerability backlogs are flooded with new vulnerabilities every day High and critical vulnerabilities accumulate faster than teams can triage or remediate them, creating operational fatigue and diminishing trust in security data.

The root cause is not a lack of effort or tooling, it's that most vulnerabilities are never actually exploitable.

The Exploitability Gap

Every vulnerability has exploitation requirements. These  define what must exist within an asset or its surrounding environment for an attacker to successfully exploit it,including  conditions such as reachable network paths, exposed services, required privileges, identity relationships, runtime configuration, and policy constraints.

Traditional security tools detect the presence of vulnerable software or configuration, but they don’t determine whether those exploitation requirements are met in the real environment.

Through analysis of hundreds of millions of vulnerability findings generated by hundreds of security tools across ZEST Security customers, a clear and consistent pattern emerged:

More than ninety percent of high and critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable in their actual environment and therefore pose no real risk.

This insight fundamentally challenges how exposure management has been practiced for over a decade.

Introducing AI Sweeper Agents

Driven by this discovery, ZEST Security conducted deep AI research to redesign vulnerability analysis from the ground up. The result is AI Sweeper Agents, an autonomous multi agent system purpose built to eliminate non exploitable vulnerabilities at scale.

AI Sweeper Agents do not score vulnerabilities. They investigate them.

AI Sweeper Agents represent a major milestone in ZEST Security mission to transform exposure management into an autonomous, AI native discipline.

By removing noise at the source, ZEST enables organizations to move faster, operate with confidence, and reduce risk without increasing operational burden.

As this capability moved into production, customers rapidly adopted ZEST’s AI agents, dismissing 11 million vulnerabilities and returning 600,000+ hours to organizations over the last six months. (A detailed breakdown of customer results is available in our blog post.)

How AI Sweeper Agents Work

AI Sweeper Agents operate as a coordinated agentic system that performs end to end exploitability analysis. 

Step One: Exploitability Research
The first agent analyzes each vulnerability to extract its exploitation requirements using vulnerability research publications, exploit documentation, and technical disclosures. This agent determines what conditions must be present for exploitation to be possible.

Step Two: Environmental Validation
A second agent evaluates the vulnerable asset within its real environment. It compares exploitation requirements against asset configuration, identity permissions, network reachability, runtime exposure, and policy controls.

Step Three: Determination and Evidence
Once a determination is made, the agent validates the conclusion and produces clear reasoning and evidence. This explanation is retained for monitoring, audit, and governance purposes, ensuring transparency and trust.

The outcome is a definitive binary decision: Is this vulnerability exploitable in this environment or not.

New Standard for Exposure Management in the AI Era

With AI Sweeper Agents, ZEST Security replaces subjective prioritization models with objective determinations of exploitability. This release represents a fundamental shift in how exposure management is performed, moving the industry away from scoring systems and assumption-based models toward clear, defensible conclusions.