The race to deploy agentic AI is on. Across the enterprise, systems that can plan, take actions and collaborate across business applications promise unprecedented efficiency. But in the rush to automate, a critical component is being overlooked: Scalable security. We are building a workforce of digital employees without giving them a secure way to log in, access data and do their jobs without creating catastrophic risk.The fundamental problem is that traditional identity and access management (IAM) designed for humans breaks at agentic scale. Controls like static roles, long-lived passwords and one-time approvals are useless when non-human identities can outnumber human ones by 10 to one. To harness the power of agentic AI, identity must evolve from a simple login gatekeeper into the dynamic control plane for your entire AI operation.“The fastest path to responsible AI is to avoid real data. Use synthetic data to prove value, then earn the right to touch the real thing.” — Shawn Kanungo, keynote speaker and innovation strategist; bestselling author of The Bold OnesWhy your human-centric IAM is a sitting duckAgentic AI does not just use software; it behaves like a user. It authenticates to systems, assumes roles and calls APIs. If you treat these agents as mere features of an application, you invite invisible privilege creep and untraceable actions. A single over-permissioned agent can exfiltrate data or trigger erroneous business processes at machine speed, with no one the wiser until it is too late.The static nature of legacy IAM is the core vulnerability. You cannot pre-define a fixed role for an agent whose tasks and required data access might change daily. The only way to keep access decisions accurate is to move policy enforcement from a one-time grant to a continuous, runtime evaluation.Prove value before production data …
