1Password's research finds AI agent adoption is outpacing governance

Summary and key findings 1Password surveyed 500 American IT and security professionals and 500 developers to learn how organizations are adopting and governing AI for their most technical workers. We found that companies are racing to embed AI agents throughout their systems, but have done so without a security architecture to effectively govern them. The result is a wide gap in visibility and accountability, in which agents access sensitive information and take actions without oversight. The impact of this agentic governance gap is already being felt in the form of security incidents, work disruptions, and credential misuse. We’ll explore the 1Password AI Agent Governance survey in depth in the blog below, but here are some of the most illustrative and surprising findings: Agents are pervasive in production environments:Nearly half (46%) of developers are using AI agents in production environments today. 45% expect to use AI agents in the next two years. In total, 91% are either using agents today or expect to do so in the next two years. Agents are accessing sensitive data without proper controls: 71% of all respondents said that AI agents have access to customer data, sensitive IP, or HR information at their companies. Meanwhile, 62% of all respondents report security gaps in how their company manages agents. Two-thirds of developers (67%) said agent security has gaps:65% of developers say they’re expected or encouraged to use AI agents, but only 33% say they have a highly secure way to do so. Agents are taking unintended actions: 47% of developers have had an AI agent take an unintended action after following instructions embedded in untrusted content (AKA prompt injection). 74% of developers witnessed unintended consequences from the use of AI agents. Agentic development is colliding with human security In the world of AI, change happens at unimaginable (in fact, inhuman) speed. And few revolutions have come more swiftly than the agentic era, in which AI agents have been adopted and embedded into companies of every size, in every industry. In 2022, agents were a concept discussed in research papers. By 2024, they were built and deployed by the first wave of experimenters. Now, 1Password’s research finds that at 89% of American companies, AI agents are required, encouraged, or at least allowed. This steep adoption curve is simultaneously astonishing and unsurprising. After all, AI agents have been billed as the fulfillment of AI’s true promise: machines that can take on complex tasks with autonomy, interface between multiple systems, and deliver the kinds of workforce efficiency gains that will justify the massive investment in LLMs. But while speed is part of the appeal of AI (Vibe code an app in an hour! Build an agent in 15 minutes!), the disciplines of security and IT are designed to be more deliberative. The result is a dangerous mismatch, with semiautonomous agents sprinting out ahead of the systems designed to control access and provide visibility into risky or anomalous behavior. The strain of this mismatch is being felt first and most strongly by organizations’ most technical employees: the developers who are using agents in high-stakes tasks, and the IT and security employees trying to build guardrails for them. Agentic access is magnifying the effects of credential sprawl Many organizations are attempting to control AI agents with the same systems they use for their human employees. Thirty-five percent of our respondents said their companies manage AI agents under existing IAM processes. Meanwhile, 21% have not yet formalized an approach to managing agentic access at all. But treating agents like humans is an inherently flawed approach. One complicating factor is that AI agents share traits of both humans and machines in how they access data and perform tasks. For example, an agent might log into a user’s email through a typical, human login flow, but then connect to their calendar through a backend integration. In either case, the access is likely to depend on different types of credentials. But simply giving raw, long-lived credentials to an agent is unsafe, since the agent could retain, expose, or misuse this information. At present, when developers want to build integrations between agents and other tools, they often rely on non-human identities (NHIs), like API keys and service accounts. These largely predate the existence of agents but are the underpinnings of all modern software automation. Unfortunately, improperly handled NHIs have been a major security problem for years, but the arrival of agents can multiply the risk. Our survey found that 71% of respondents use unsecure methods of handling secrets and NHIs. Other findings worth highlighting include: A quarter of developers (24%) hardcode credentials One in five developers (20%) share credentials through Slack or email 43% of developers don’t use a dedicated secrets manager or vault In your day-to-day work, how d

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