The cybersecurity industry has an AI problem. Not a shortage of AI. Too much of it, and almost all of it bolted on as an afterthought. Heimdal just made its case for a different approach.
The Copenhagen-based cybersecurity company unveiled a three-layer expansion of its AI Wingman system alongside a new product called Third-Party AI Containment. Together, they represent Heimdal's bet that security AI needs to live inside the platform, not sit on top of it. The announcement dropped on April 21 and is rolling out in stages across 2026.
In a market flooded with AI copilots and chatbot assistants, Heimdal is drawing a line: the next generation of security AI isn't an assistant. It's infrastructure.
Three Layers, One Umbrella, Zero Standalone Chatbots
AI Wingman is Heimdal's umbrella for how AI shows up across the platform. CEO Jesper Frederiksen has been vocal about rejecting the 'bolt-on AI assistant' model that most security vendors have adopted. His argument: AI that sits at the edge of your stack can only see what you show it. AI that's built into the platform sees everything.
The three new layers break down like this. Assist is the guidance layer. It helps customers configure Heimdal correctly, understand what they're looking at, and apply best-practice settings. Think of it as onboarding intelligence that never leaves.
Triage sits in the middle. Powered by what Heimdal calls a multi-agent engine, it helps security teams assess suspicious signals faster. Not by replacing analysts, but by doing the initial validation work: is this signal real? What's the context? What's the recommended next step? The goal is cutting L1 triage time by roughly 25%.
SOC is the managed service layer. For customers using Heimdal's security operations center, AI acceleration helps analysts investigate faster, prioritize better, and shrink response times. The initial release covers 15 SOC-relevant protection features.
Shadow AI Is the Threat Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here's where it gets interesting. Heimdal also introduced Third-Party AI Containment, a product designed to manage the security risks created by AI tools that employees are already using. Shadow AI, in other words.
Every organization has employees feeding data into ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and dozens of other AI tools. Most security teams have no visibility into what's being shared, what's being generated, or what risks those interactions create. Heimdal's containment layer is designed to give CISOs that visibility and control.
It's a shrewd product bet. The market for securing AI usage inside organizations barely exists yet, but the problem is already massive. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2026, over 80% of enterprises will have employees using generative AI tools without formal governance. Heimdal is positioning itself to be the security layer for that ungoverned usage.
AI Wingman Layer | Function | Target User |
|---|---|---|
Assist | Platform guidance, onboarding, best-practice settings | All customers |
Triage | Investigation support via multi-agent engine | Security teams |
SOC | Managed service acceleration, faster response | Managed SOC customers |
AI Containment | Visibility and control over employee AI tool usage | CISOs, IT governance |
Why 'Built In' Beats 'Bolted On' in Security AI
Frederiksen's core thesis is that cybersecurity AI fails when it's treated as a feature rather than a foundation. Most vendors have taken existing products and added an AI chatbot or copilot interface. The AI can answer questions about what the platform is seeing. It can suggest actions. But it can't actually see the full picture because it's sitting at the presentation layer, not the data layer.
Heimdal's approach embeds AI where the detection data, control policies, and response workflows already live. The multi-agent engine behind Triage doesn't query an API to understand what happened. It processes the same signal data that Heimdal's detection engine processes. That architectural difference matters when speed is the entire point of security operations.
Whether Heimdal can deliver on this vision across all three layers in 2026 is the open question. Building a multi-agent security engine that's accurate enough for production SOC work is genuinely hard. Hallucinations in a chatbot are annoying. Hallucinations in a triage engine could mean missed threats.
A Decade of Data Gives Copenhagen's Security Player an Edge
Heimdal doesn't get the same attention as flashier cybersecurity companies, but it's been steadily building one of the widest security platforms in Europe. Founded in Copenhagen in 2014, the company claims to offer the world's widest unified cybersecurity platform, covering endpoint, email, identity, network, and now AI governance. It recently partnered with Elovade to distribute its platform across Nordic MSPs, expanding its channel reach significantly.
Denmark's proximity to large Nordic enterprises (think Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Danske Bank) gives local security companies a built-in customer base of organizations that take cyber risk seriously. Heimdal has spent a decade accumulating security telemetry from that base.
The AI Wingman expansion isn't a pivot. It's a natural extension of a platform that's been quietly gathering data for years. The question is whether Heimdal can move fast enough to define the category before the bigger players, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft, bring their own integrated AI security layers to market.
For now, the 25% L1 triage reduction target is a concrete, measurable claim. If they hit it, the rest of the roadmap gets a lot more credible.