Why Agentic AI Matters for the Future of Cybersecurity

As the cybersecurity landscape transforms, the rise of agentic AI is changing how organizations think about machine identities, or Non-Human Identities (NHIs). What happens when machines, powered by autonomous AI, become key actors in your digital ecosystem? The simple answer: you need to rethink how you govern, monitor, and secure them.

Understanding NHIs in Today’s Cloud-Native World

NHIs are machine identities—software agents, APIs, automation bots—that use “secrets” (tokens, keys, credentials) to access systems and perform tasks. Just as a human uses a passport and visa to enter a foreign country, NHIs use secrets and permissions to access resources. Secure the human identities, and you protect one facet, but left unmanaged NHIs become hidden doorways into your environment.

As industries like finance, healthcare and travel adopt agentic AI systems, they also amplify the number of NHIs. That means a growing attack surface for security teams: more identities, more credentials, more access points, and more risk.

Why Mature NHI Management is Crucial

When you treat machine identities with the same discipline that you apply to human ones, you gain several benefits:

• Risk drops: proactively discover NHIs, map their access and limit exposure.
• Compliance improves: clear audit trails for non-human access and actions.
• Efficiency increases: automation handles identity/secrets lifecycle and frees up your team for strategic work.
• Visibility and control expand: you get centralized insight into who/what is doing what—across cloud, services and AI agents.
• Operational cost savings: fewer manual errors, fewer forgotten credentials, fewer deprecated identities lingering in your environment.
   

Bringing Agentic AI Into Your Security Strategy

Agentic AI is no longer science fiction. It’s being used in DevOps, SOCs, and automation across enterprises. But with its power comes complexity: such agents need identities, access, and secrets. In the last year, the average number of human identities to non-human identities has grown from 92:1 to a whopping 144:1, largely due to the rapid adoption of Agentic AI tools.

This amplifies the need for proper governance. To get this right, you must ensure your NHI security processes are robust, and aligned with agentic AI workflows so your organization can reap the benefits of automation without exposing itself to unacceptable risk.

Key Strategic Considerations for Security Leaders

If you’re a CISO or security leader, here are some themes to consider:

• Break down silos between your R&D/DevOps teams and your security org: when machine identities are created in the wild, you need joint ownership.
• Invest in real-time monitoring of NHIs: continuous observability helps detect anomalous behavior early.
• Treat NHI security as part of your broader identity posture, not an afterthought.
• Adopt lifecycle, secrets-rotation and zero-trust paradigms for machine identities: create them with the least privileges, monitor them continuously, and retire them aggressively if unused.
• Ensure your governance programs cover non-human actors: your audit, access-review and vendor/third-party checks must include machines too.
• Build a culture where developers and operators understand that machines are first-class citizens in the security model.
   

Why the Future Demands This Focus

Today’s organizations are increasingly powered by automation, cloud services and AI agents. In that world, NHIs quietly become major actors, running jobs, accessing sensitive data, interacting with external systems. If they are unmanaged, they become attack vectors. Without a strong NHI management and agentic-AI strategy, you risk unauthorized access, data loss or misuse of computing resources.

By elevating NHIs into your identity framework and embedding security into the lifecycle of agentic AI and machine identities, you turn a potential vulnerability into a strategic strength. You not only defend your organization, you position it to leverage AI and automation securely and confidently.

In short: the convergence of agentic AI and NHIs means the “machine-identity surface” now matters as much as the human one. If you haven’t already, it’s time to bring machine identity security into your enterprise’s frontline strategy.