18 insights from SailPoint’s Navigate event: Enterprises race to bring identity security for AI agents up to machine speed

AI agents have made identity the front line of enterprise security. Agents now number in the thousands. They pick up access nobody meant to give them, and when they’re blocked partway through a task, they look for another way in. That has turned identity security for AI agents into a board-level priority rather than a future project. The focus has moved from finding agents to acting on what discovery turns up. The next phase will be about remediation at machine speed: just-in-time access instead of standing privilege, a named human owner for every agent and enforcement that sits outside the agent itself. “We need administrative, we need good compliance controls, but the real issue now … is how do you secure all these identities?” said Mark McClain (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of SailPoint Technologies Inc. “It took a very small amount of analysis for our technical team to go, ‘We can’t do this effectively in quote admin time.’ We have to be in the real-time decision-making cycle of, ‘Is this agent with its context and its intent doing what we expect?'” McClain and other industry experts spoke to theCUBE…