How AI agents are making identity security more ‘critical’ than ever: Partners

When it comes to identity, “we see it as that really necessary piece to help manage anything in the AI space - but specifically agentic,” says GuidePoint Security identity security leader Kevin Converse

As the rush continues around deploying AI agents across organisations of all sizes, one question in particular is becoming impossible for security teams to ignore: Who - or what - is actually getting access to the organisation’s IT systems?

And just as important as the visibility question is a second issue relevant to cyber risk: Is that access actually appropriate?

For solution providers, helping to answer those questions for customers has become a massive and growing focus in 2026, as CISOs and CIOs grapple with mandates to securely enable agentic automation within their companies.

That shift is putting even greater pressure on security and IT teams to rethink their approach to identity security and access management - especially around non-human identities, life-cycle governance, least privilege and continuous monitoring, solution provider execs tell CRN.

“Identity absolutely is the perimeter at this point,” says Rob Gregory, CISO at Optiv.

“Agents in and of themselves are identities. And what they can do - or what they should be able to do - needs to be tracked, reviewed, attested to.”

“There should be an approval process. It should have your traditional life-cycle management. It should have your traditional identity and access management (IAM) practices.”

Without a doubt, there is a huge identity risk when agents inherit human privileges without oversight from their organisations, according to Ian Swanson, AI security leader at Palo Alto Networks.

“Many times we will find that there are agents running on the loose that don’t have strict least-privilege controls,” Swanson says.

“Or let’s say an identity takes on a human identity. What if you were to leave the enterprise, but now that agent lives on and it’s carrying out tasks and it has your privileges?”

Ultimately, organisations must ensure they are “constantly” assessing the underlying posture configuration around identity and access so that there are delegated controls on the identity front, he says.

In that vein, discovery is of course crucial, but the other challenge is making sure that “you have those all those insights that you’re able to see in real time, to be able to say, ‘OK, are those actions actually approved or not?’” Swanson adds.

That visibility challenge is only getting steeper as AI is increasingly adopted from the bottom up, according to Nancy Wang, CTO at 1Password.

“Shadow AI is like shadow IT on steroids,” Wang says.

“You don’t know what your employees are using. You don’t know how they’re using it - or even why they’re using it.”

The bottom line is that if employees are using company data with unsanctioned AI agents, “then you’re essentially exfiltrating sensitive data from your enterprise into the world - or even worse, credentials, whereby attackers can use those to [compromise] you,” she says.

At the same time, solution providers says the rapid adoption of agentic AI is making the problems more urgent.

Many companies, they say, are rapidly adding new, automated identities into environments, which were often already struggling with forms of machine access such as service accounts, certificates, API tokens and secrets - non-human identities securely authenticating to and interacting with sensitive resources like databases or cloud services.

Non-human identity has long been a challenge for privileged access management (PAM) practitioners.

What’s new is the scale and urgency within businesses, according to Cyderes’ James Hauswirth.

A non-human identity is an authorisation and authentication mechanism that allows an activity to be performed either automatically or at least through a process that doesn’t require human intervention, says Hauswirth, global managing director of PAM at Cyderes.

That includes everything from software agents running on laptops to certificates, service accounts, tokens and secrets, he notes.

The thing to keep in mind is that AI agents will use whatever authentication mechanism they can, Hauswirth says.

“Part of the challenge is that AI can use whatever identity it’s given access to to be able to go out and do whatever it does,” he says.

While the estimates vary about how many agents there may end up being in proportion to each human worker, it will no doubt add up to an “explosion” of agentic identities over time, according to Hauswirth.

The reality is that not only is it a major challenge to understand what agents can access, but there are also big hurdles around determining who the agents belong to - and whether the agents’ actions are even still aligned with their original purpose, 1Password’s Wang says.

There’s no question that the cyber risk from uncontrolled agents could be massive, according to industry execs.

When it comes to an agent running locally on a device, a la OpenClaw, the agent has access to “all your data files,” says George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike.

“Everyone [is] plugging in their credentials to plug into Box and Dropbox and Google Drive and their email and every other thing that’s out there.”

All in all, if agents are being granted access to data and workflows, “how do you even know what’s going on?” he says.

“This is really scary stuff.”

Increasingly, that is a top concern for customers as AI agents introduce new layers of uncertainty into already complex environments, according to Arctic Wolf CEO Nick Schneider.

“How do I know that my employees are leveraging company assets - in particular, data - in a way that is proper, given that we know that there are LLMs they could plug anything into to get an output?

“That requires certain detections and visibility into what’s happening on the network or the browser or the endpoint to be able to identify what’s happening, and/or identify through identity [systems] whether it’s a human taking an action or an agent taking an action.”

Even as the agentic surge continues, there’s also a risk that identity and access concerns may fall to the wayside amid the pressing needs around updating vulnerability management, following the emergence of powerful frontier AI models for vulnerability discovery, execs say.

Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO of Zscaler, says the emergence of AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery - paired with long‑running challenges such as insufficient patching - has created a level of anxiety in the cyber field that he has never seen before.

To enable a strong security posture in a threat environment that may see as much as a 20-fold spike in software vulnerabilities, “our view is that the best security is what we have been talking about from the start of Zscaler with zero trust,” Chaudhry says.

Zero-trust principles, likewise, are critical when it comes to identity security and access controls, solution providers say.

Importantly, this creates a significant advisory and services opportunity, as customers need help discovering where non-human identities exist and determining who owns them - as well as understanding what they can access and deciding how long that access should last, according to solution providers.

When it comes to enabling AI agents, identity security and access controls are undoubtedly “critically important” - and on track to only become more essential going forward, says Kevin Converse, VP for identity and access management at GuidePoint Security.

“We see it as that really necessary piece to help manage anything in the AI space - but specifically agentic,” says Converse.

“When you see the non-human identity explosion, that is kind of a new space for everyone.

“So, trying to figure out what’s the best way to get visibility - that’s the first piece of it. And then [the goal is] finding ways to put controls around it.”

This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.