For decades, identity and access management (IAM) was primarily a human problem.Enterprises built security architectures around people who were onboarded by HR,issued static credentials and governed by policy. That model was not designed for the world that is taking shape.
Traditional IAM and privileged access management (PAM) platforms were designed for human users at human scale. However, non-human identities (NHIs) such as service accounts, API keys, tokens and machine credentials already vastly outnumber human identities in most organizations: Multiple independent studies suggest the ratio ranges from 50:1 to as high as 144:1. Unlike human identities, NHIs are created inside code repositories, CI/CD pipelines and DevOps scripts by developers that are mainly focused
on shipping software, not enforcing security policy. Agentic AI is widening that gap: AI agents can log into services, make decisions and act across enterprise environments, all without human involvement.