By the end of 2025, more than 45 billion non-human and agentic identities — or more than 12 times the number of humans in the global workforce — will be deployed into organizational workflows. Use cases are cross-functional, with nearly two-thirds of AI agents focused on automating critical business processes across HR, finance, sales operations, supply chain management, customer service and administrative tasks. Agentic AI poses a two-way authentication threat: AI agents can both harvest credentials at scale and exploit them to impersonate legitimate services. This recent case is a preview of what could come: AI-enabled chat agents impersonated Salesforce’s Data Loader application by using the real software’s client ID to compromise administrators across multiple organizations, impacting more than a million customers, including those of major cybersecurity vendors.

Full opinion : If you don’t authenticate AI agents upfront, you’re not running automation — you’re handing attackers the keys at machine speed.