Torq HyperSOC: Meet Socrates, the Omni-Agent Running Your SOC

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Part one of a six-part series looking at the current wave of AI-driven SOC automation tools — Torq HyperSOC, Tines, Dropzone AI, Prophet Security, Cortex XSIAM/AgentiX, and StackStorm.

The security operations centre has spent the last two years wrestling with a genuinely uncomfortable problem: alert volume has scaled faster than headcount ever could, and traditional SOAR — built on static playbooks and if-this-then-that rules — can’t reason its way through anything it wasn’t explicitly told to expect. That’s the gap the current crop of “AI SOC” vendors are all chasing, and Torq is one of the more established names doing it.

What Torq HyperSOC actually is

Torq started as a hyperautomation platform — think a more modern, cloud-native alternative to legacy SOAR — and HyperSOC is its answer to the agentic AI moment. Rather than bolting a chatbot onto existing playbooks, Torq built HyperSOC around an “omni-agent” called Socrates, which coordinates four subordinate agents: a Runbook Agent that turns plain-language instructions into automated workflows with no code required, an Investigation Agent that enriches and roots out the cause of alerts automatically, a Remediation Agent that carries out corrective actions across connected tools, and a Case Management Agent that keeps every incident tracked, prioritised, and summarised in real time.

The pitch is that this multi-agent setup can resolve the vast majority of Tier-1 alerts, and a meaningful chunk of Tier-2 work, without a human ever touching them — Torq’s own figures claim as much as 95%. Whatever the real-world number turns out to be for any given SOC, the direction of travel is clear: less manual triage, more oversight of an AI system that’s already done the triage.

Where it fits, and who’s using it

Torq offers both agentic and deterministic automation, so teams aren’t forced to hand every decision to an AI agent if they’d rather keep some processes rule-based and predictable. It’s been adopted by a fairly long list of large enterprises — Uber, Marriott, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble and Siemens among them — which says something about its readiness for environments where a wrong automated action has real consequences.

Torq isn’t alone in this space, and that’s really the point of this series. IDC’s security analysts have identified over 40 vendors now playing in AI-augmented SOAR, ranging from freestanding platforms like Torq, Swimlane, and Tines, through to newer “AI SOC analyst” pure-plays like Dropzone AI and Prophet Security. We’ll get to those next.

Next in this series: Tines and its no-code approach to agentic SOC workflows.

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