December 16, 2025

Author: Danny Brickman, CEO & Co-Founder of Oasis Security

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how work gets done. For the last two decades, the digital workforce was binary: there were humans, and there were machines. Humans were creative and unpredictable; machines were static and deterministic.

Security strategies were built around this distinction. We secured humans with SSO, MFA, and rigid role-based access controls (RBAC). We secured machines (service accounts, API keys, and bots) by locking them down with static permissions and rotating their secrets occasionally.

But 2024 and 2025 have introduced a third category that breaks this model: The AI Agent.

Recent data suggests that AI agent adoption is growing exponentially, AI non-human identities (NHIs) are now growing 4–6x faster than human identities across the Fortune 500. These aren’t just passive scripts or chatbots; they are autonomous actors capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex workflows across your cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments.

The problem? Most organizations are still trying to secure these dynamic agents using static, legacy identity tools.

The “Mutant” Identity Problem

To understand the risk, we have to look at how agents differ from traditional automation.

A standard service account is deterministic. If you give a script credentials to read a database, it reads the database—every time, in the exact same way. It doesn’t “decide” to delete a table or email a customer list to a third party unless it was explicitly coded to do so.

AI Agents are different. They are non-deterministic. They accept natural language prompts (which can be ambiguous), interpret intent, and then choose which tools to use to achieve a goal.

If a developer grants an agent a broad OAuth scope (like “Read/Write CRM”) that agent now holds standing privileges to your most sensitive data. If the agent gets confused, hallucinates, or is tricked by a prompt injection attack, it has the autonomy to misuse those valid credentials in ways no firewall or static policy can predict.

It is a ‘Mutant Identity’ – a layer of access that is prompt-driven like a human, but automated and high-speed like a machine. And it requires a new security paradigm: Agentic Access Management (AAM).

A Framework for Securing the Agentic Future

Securing this new workforce doesn’t mean blocking innovation. It means upgrading our governance to match the speed and autonomy of the agents we are deploying.

If your organization is scaling its use of AI agents, here is a three-part framework (a “Tip and Trick” strategy) to secure and regain control over your non-human identities (NHIs).

1. Shift from “Static” to “Intent-Aware”

The biggest gap in traditional IAM is the lack of context. A traditional log shows that Service_Account_X accessed Database_Y. It doesn’t tell you why.

For AI agents, context is everything. Security teams need to move toward Intent-Aware Policy Enforcement. This means your security controls shouldn’t just look at the API call; they should evaluate the prompt or the “plan” the agent has generated.

• The Tip: specific guardrails should be established based on business intent. For example, an agent meant to summarize support tickets should have a policy that explicitly blocks it from exporting customer PII, even if the underlying service account technically has “read” permissions. You need to validate the intent of the action, not just the permission of the identity.

2. Kill the “Standing Privilege”

In the old world, we gave a service account a set of keys and left them active for months (or years). In the agentic world, this is a massive liability. Because agents are experimental and often spun up by developers in “shadow AI” environments, long-lived credentials are prone to leakage.

The industry best practice is moving toward Just-in-Time (JIT) Ephemeral Sessions.

• The Tip: Stop handing out permanent API keys to agents. Instead, architect your environment so that agents must request access at the moment of need.
• How it works: When an agent needs to access Salesforce, it should request a session. The security layer validates the request against policy, issues a short-lived token valid only for that specific task (e.g., 5 minutes), and then destroys the token immediately after. This shrinks the attack surface from “forever” to “milliseconds.”

3. Visibility is the Foundation

You cannot govern what you cannot see. The rise of “Shadow AI” means that marketing, engineering, and HR are likely spinning up agents you don’t know about. These agents are creating new identities, generating API keys, and connecting to corporate data without passing through IT.

• The Tip: Implement a continuous discovery process for Non-Human Identities. You need a live inventory that maps Identity → Agent → Owner → Data.
• The “Trick” for CISOs: Ask your team one question: “If an AI agent performed a destructive action in our environment today, could we trace the chain of custody back to the specific human prompt that caused it?” If the answer is no, your visibility gap is your biggest risk.

From the “Department of No” to the “Department of Know-How”

For years, Identity and Security teams have been unfairly labeled the “Department of No”, blocking access because our tools forced us to slow the business down to keep it safe.

Agentic Access Management changes that dynamic. By treating AI agents as a unique class of identity (one that requires intent analysis, ephemeral access, and total lifecycle visibility) we can move from a posture of fear to a posture of confidence.

We can finally say “Yes” to AI innovation, because the guardrails are enforced per session, not per year. Identity stops being a bottleneck and becomes the enabler that allows the business to run fast, safely.

If you’re asking: “How do we actually control what AI agents can do in our environment?”

This is the answer.

• Request a demo to see how intent-aware, just-in-time access works in your environment.
• Explore the Agentic Access Framework for the operating model behind AAM.
• Get certified with our NHI Management Fundamentals program to strengthen your foundations.
• Reach out to GuidePoint for support.

AI agents are already in the enterprise. We can help ensure they stay safe, governed, and accountable.