As enterprises race to deploy agentic AI, many are discovering an uncomfortable truth: Their identity and access models were never designed for autonomous systems that reason, plan and act at machine speed. For more than a decade, zero-trust has reshaped how organizations think about security. The principle of ‘never trust, always verify’ pushed the industry away from perimeter-based defenses toward identity-centric access control. But while zero-trust redefined authentication and network trust, it stopped short of addressing a deeper challenge that is rapidly emerging: Governing privilege in environments defined by automation, ephemerality and non-deterministic systems. Agentic AI is accelerating this shift. Unlike traditional applications or service accounts, AI agents can autonomously execute multi-step actions across infrastructure, applications and data environments. They can provision resources, modify configurations, trigger workflows and interact with other systems with minimal human oversight. In effect, they function as high-speed operators inside the enterprise.

Full report : Why Privileged Access is Becoming the Control Plane for Agentic AI.