AI agents now act on behalf of users, call APIs, and chain tools together. They need identities, scopes, and audit trails, and almost no existing IAM stack was designed for them.

Analysts and vendors formalized non-human identity governance as its own category, covering discovery, posture, and lifecycle for machine identities.

CyberArk research found non-human identities vastly outnumber human ones, driven by cloud and AI, and that most organizations lack controls for them.