AI Agents Turn Identity into an Enterprise-Scale Control Problem
Identity teams are discovering that traditional enterprise IAM security frameworks were not designed for autonomous software. AI agents now execute workflows, make API calls and access sensitive data at machine speed, often without clear owners or durable accounts. Industry research underscores the scale of the problem: surveys cited by SailPoint show that 85% of organizations already run AI agents in production, while most struggle to distinguish human activity from agent activity. Meanwhile, Palo Alto Networks reports that 91% of surveyed organizations are operating autonomous agents in live environments. These agents are ephemeral, delegated and frequently interconnected, which breaks assumptions baked into legacy identity and access management tools. As a result, security teams are shifting toward AI agent identity management and identity governance automation, seeking a way to represent each agent as a traceable identity, enforce agentic access control and revoke privileges as soon as a task is complete.
SailPoint’s Agentic Fabric: Mapping AI Agents to Owners, Data and Access
SailPoint’s new Agentic Fabric aims to pull AI agents into the same governance discipline applied to employees, service accounts and other non-human identities. The platform creates an inventory of AI agents, machine identities and applications across cloud services, application agents and endpoints, then maps those entities and their relationships to critical data through an identity graph. Each agent is associated with a human owner, enabling lifecycle management that includes onboarding, access changes and decommissioning. SailPoint positions this as identity governance automation for agentic workloads, enforcing least-privilege access, real-time authorization and protection controls. New commercial tiers such as Agentic Business and Agentic Business Plus extend least-privilege and zero-standing privilege models to all identities, ensuring powerful permissions are granted just in time and revoked immediately afterward. By treating AI agents as first-class identities, Agentic Fabric helps enterprises apply consistent policies, auditing and threat detection across both human and non-human actors.
Palo Alto Networks’ Idira: A Unified Control Layer for Human and Agentic Identities
Palo Alto Networks is tackling the same challenge from a security-operations perspective with Idira, an AI identity-security control layer that unifies human, machine and agentic identities. Idira pulls together capabilities from CyberArk, Koi and Portkey so security teams can see which users, services and AI agents exist, what they are allowed to do and when they hold elevated privileges. CyberArk contributes privileged-access management, governing when human or agentic identities can receive elevated rights and how quickly those rights are revoked. Koi provides visibility into less traditional AI-related assets such as plugins, scripts and endpoint artifacts that often sit outside legacy identity systems. Portkey extends agent-governance logic, monitoring and securing autonomous software activity. Integrated with Prisma AIRS, Cortex and Strata, Idira moves identity decisions closer to runtime AI security workflows, network enforcement and incident response, offering a single control plane for agentic access control across the enterprise.
From Shadow AI to Governed Non-Human Identities
Both SailPoint and Palo Alto Networks are responding to the emergence of shadow AI and rapidly proliferating non-human identities. SailPoint’s Discovery Tool is designed to surface hidden AI agents and applications already operating across enterprise environments, then draw them into formal governance structures via Agentic Fabric. Palo Alto, through Idira and Prisma AIRS, pulls AI agents, plugins and scripts into a unified policy framework that aligns with existing security operations. In both cases, the goal is to eliminate blind spots where autonomous agents operate beyond traditional IAM controls. By standardizing AI agent identity management, enterprises can apply consistent onboarding, entitlement reviews, and revocation policies, while improving monitoring and forensic tracing. This approach helps close the gap between classic IAM systems and the unique requirements of AI-driven workloads, turning non-human identities from unmanaged risk into governed participants in enterprise IAM security strategies.
Converging Paths: Identity Governance as the Backbone of AI Security
SailPoint and Palo Alto Networks are approaching the same core requirement from different angles: identity must become the backbone of AI security. SailPoint anchors agentic access control in identity governance and administration, emphasizing lifecycle management, least-privilege policies and zero-standing privilege for all identities. Palo Alto blends identity with runtime AI security, network controls and security operations, ensuring that decisions about agent permissions are enforced where AI activity actually occurs. Together, these efforts reflect a broader market shift: enterprises are formalizing non-human identities, registering AI agents, automating credential handling and embedding policy-driven authorization into AI pipelines. As agentic systems grow more autonomous and interconnected, organizations that extend their IAM and identity governance automation to cover AI agents will be better positioned to balance innovation with control, reducing the risk of over-privileged or rogue agents while maintaining agility in production environments.