AI agents are moving into production faster than security teams can govern them. They are connecting to apps, handling data, calling APIs, and acting across business systems—often without the same controls applied to human users.
According to Okta’s Global CISO Insights 2026 report, only 47% of CISOs are confident they can identify every AI agent in their environment. Even among those who feel confident about visibility, roughly 80% still worry that excessive access may be going unreviewed.
That is the real problem: seeing an agent is not the same as controlling what it can do.
Join Matt Immler, Regional CSO at Okta, for a practical session on how to bring AI agents under stronger identity governance before excessive access becomes harder to contain.
Most Organizations Are Still Using Yesterday’s Controls
AI agents create a new identity challenge, but many organizations are still managing them with controls designed for traditional service accounts.
Only one in four organizations surveyed has adopted a purpose-built framework for securing AI agents. Meanwhile, 21% still rely on shared credentials or broad-permission service accounts.
That makes basic questions harder to answer:
- Which agent has access?
- Who approved it?
- What systems can it reach?
- Does it still need those permissions?
- Can its access be revoked without disrupting other services?
As AI adoption grows, these gaps become more difficult to manage.
A better model is to treat every AI agent as a first-class identity—with its own owner, permissions, lifecycle, and access reviews.
Shadow AI Needs Governance, Not Just Blocking
Security teams also have to deal with AI tools appearing outside normal approval processes.
Trying to block everything may slow adoption, but it does not solve the underlying governance problem. Teams need a way to discover AI agents, understand what they can access, assign ownership, and bring them under consistent controls.
Okta’s research suggests organizations with more mature identity governance are better positioned to manage this risk. They report less shadow AI, faster response to rogue agents, and lower concern around AI-enabled breaches.
The takeaway is straightforward: AI agent security is becoming an identity governance problem.
Security teams need to know what agents exist, what they can access, whether that access is justified, and how quickly it can be removed when risk changes.
Register for the webinar to learn how to govern AI agents as first-class identities, control shadow AI, and prevent excessive access from becoming the next major identity gap.
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