The enterprise identity perimeter has fundamentally shifted from being centered on human users to being dominated by non-human identities such as APIs, service accounts, workloads, bots and Agentic AI systems. As cloud adoption accelerates and AI becomes embedded in core workflows, machine identities increasingly act as the primary operators across enterprise environments.

Agentic AI poses a new governance challenge because AI agents can reason, initiate actions and dynamically request or accumulate access across multiple systems with little to no human intervention. This rapid growth of often overprivileged and inconsistently governed machine identities leads to identity sprawl, unclear ownership, limited visibility, audit gaps and operational risks such as expired certificates, unmanaged secrets and token misuse—thereby reducing enterprise control and accountability.