Social Engineering AI Agents: The New BEC for 2026

As enterprises give AI agents authority over workflows like vendor management, payments, and hiring, attackers can manipulate those agents through prompt injection and other social-engineering techniques to trigger fraudulent actions without compromising a human first. The business impact is an expanded BEC-style threat surface with higher risk of payment diversion, data leakage, and third-party-driven breaches, meaning IT and security teams must treat AI agents as privileged users and not just tools. For CIOs, this shifts AI governance from productivity enablement to operational risk management, requiring tighter controls around permissions, input sanitization, and integration oversight.