C1.ai report shows agentic AI and NHI risk rising together

At a glance

What this is: This is C1.ai's 2025 survey analysis of identity security priorities, showing that agentic AI adoption, identity attacks, and NHI urgency are all climbing at once.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI programmes now have to govern dynamic agent behaviour, long-lived machine credentials, and human access under the same operational pressure.

By the numbers:

• 89% of respondents say they plan to implement AI agents in their security departments within the next two years.
• 82% of organizations experienced at least one identity-driven cyberattack or data breach in the past year, up from 77% in 2024.
• 93% of security leaders said the risks associated with NHIs are urgent.

👉 Read C1.ai's 2025 Future of Identity Security Report

Context

Identity security now has to deal with three pressures at once: human access, non-human identities, and AI agents that can change access patterns at runtime. Traditional IAM models can still manage logins and roles, but they struggle when the subject is a service account, an API key, or an agent making decisions during execution.

C1.ai's survey captures that shift through the lens of 494 security professionals across multiple industries. The article is not arguing for a single product direction; it is showing that teams are already treating identity as a frontline security issue, with NHI governance and agentic AI moving into the same operational conversation.

For practitioners, the important point is that the governance problem is no longer confined to user provisioning or periodic review cycles. The controls that worked when identity was mostly human now have to account for ephemeral decisions, persistent machine credentials, and broader blast radius across connected systems.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern AI systems that can act without human approval?

A: Security teams should govern autonomous AI the same way they govern other high-risk identities, but with runtime enforcement instead of periodic review. That means tightly scoping tools, data, and actions; logging every material step; and making revocation and containment available while the session is still active. Static policy alone does not control machine-paced execution.

Q: Why do non-human identities create more risk than many human accounts?

A: NHIs often outnumber human users, have broader permissions, and operate with less day-to-day review. That combination increases the chance that a single exposed secret or delegated token can be reused across systems without detection. The risk is not just compromise, but silent persistence inside automated workflows and third-party integrations.

Q: How can teams tell whether identity governance is actually reducing risk?

A: Look for fewer unmanaged identities, faster revocation of unnecessary access, and lower reliance on standing privilege. If identity sources still conflict, shadow services keep appearing, or privileged activity remains invisible, the programme is improving process without materially reducing attack surface.

Q: Who should own risk when an AI agent triggers privileged actions?

A: Ownership should sit with the team that governs the identity, tools, and downstream systems the agent can affect. Security, IAM, platform, and application teams all share pieces of the risk, but one named owner must be accountable for the full delegation chain. Without that, audit and response become fragmented.

Technical breakdown

Why agentic AI changes identity governance

Agentic AI is different from ordinary automation because the actor can select actions, choose tools, and decide when to execute without a human approval gate on each step. That makes identity governance a runtime problem, not just a provisioning problem. Access is no longer a fixed assignment tied to a person or service account. It becomes a moving boundary shaped by the agent's current task, available context, and delegated authority. In practice, this pushes teams toward tighter scope controls, stronger telemetry, and explicit boundaries around what the agent can do at execution time.

Practical implication: treat agent permissions as runtime scope, not static entitlements.

Why NHI sprawl keeps outpacing visibility

NHIs include service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, and workload identities, and they are often created faster than they are inventoried. That creates a structural visibility gap: teams may know a system exists, but not which credentials it uses, where they live, or whether they still have standing privilege. Long-lived secrets and over-provisioned access turn routine machine identity into a durable attack path. Once an NHI is embedded in code, CI/CD, or a third-party integration, its blast radius can extend well beyond the original owner.

Practical implication: build an inventory of every machine identity and its credential lifecycle.

Why identity incidents now drive budget and priority shifts

The report shows that identity is no longer treated as a narrow IAM administration function. Once breaches and near-misses are attributed to credentials, access paths, or delegated permissions, identity becomes a security control surface with direct board-level relevance. That changes how organisations fund IAM, how they justify NHI governance, and how they evaluate tooling across PAM, secrets management, and identity analytics. The practical challenge is prioritisation: teams must decide which identities pose the highest blast radius and which controls reduce risk fastest.

Practical implication: rank identity controls by blast radius, not by administrative convenience.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The objective is to turn trusted identity into broad access that can be reused for theft, lateral movement, or operational disruption.

1. Entry begins when attackers target exposed or weakly governed identity paths, including compromised service credentials, API keys, and over-permissioned access that can be reused across systems.
2. Escalation follows when standing privilege or broad delegated access lets the actor move from one account or workload into additional systems without triggering strong review or containment.
3. Impact occurs when the compromised identity is used to access data, pivot into connected environments, or launch further abuse through trusted integrations.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Moltbook AI agent keys breach — Moltbook breach exposed 1.5M AI agent keys.
• Meta AI Instagram Account Takeover — 20,225 Instagram accounts hijacked via compromised Meta AI support chatbot with overprivileged access.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Agentic AI makes identity governance a runtime discipline, not a provisioning discipline. The report's adoption signal matters because 89% of respondents plan to deploy AI agents, yet those systems can decide and act within the session. That means traditional IAM assumptions about stable access windows, predictable request patterns, and human-paced approval cycles no longer hold. The field has to treat agent behaviour as an identity problem in motion, not as a variant of workflow automation.

Non-human identity sprawl is now a control-plane problem, not a tooling problem. NHIs are not merely numerous; they are distributed across code, pipelines, cloud services, and third-party connections. That distribution creates a governance gap that no single vault or dashboard closes on its own. The useful concept here is identity blast radius: the measure of how far one credential can reach before containment. Practitioners should read NHI sprawl as a signal that access boundaries are no longer locally managed.

Controlled speed is becoming the dominant identity strategy. The article captures a security function under pressure to move fast while still reducing breach exposure. That combination validates Zero Trust, just-in-time access, and tighter entitlement boundaries, but only when they are applied to the actual actor type. Human IAM, NHI governance, and autonomous agent controls are now converging into one operational design problem. The implication is that identity teams must design for speed with containment, not speed versus containment.

Identity risk is shifting budget language from administration to exposure management. When 82% of organisations report identity-driven attacks or breaches, identity stops being a support function and becomes a primary defence layer. That changes the governance conversation from who has access to how far that access can travel and how quickly it can be revoked. Security teams should expect executive scrutiny to move from compliance checklists toward measurable containment and credential control.

Access review models alone cannot keep up with autonomous or machine-paced identity behaviour. Reviews and recertification still matter, but their value depends on the identity remaining stable long enough to be observed. NHIs already strain that assumption, and agentic systems weaken it further by changing access use at runtime. The governance model that emerges is continuous scope validation across all actor types, with lifecycle control tied to real use rather than calendar cadence.

From our research:

• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time.
• The 52 NHI Breaches Analysis helps practitioners connect visibility failures to real-world breach patterns.

What this signals

Identity blast radius: most programmes still optimise for access administration, but the next maturity step is measuring how far one identity can move before it is contained. With only 5.7% of organisations reporting full visibility into service accounts, the governance gap is already structural rather than tactical.

The rise of agentic AI means teams should expect identity controls to be evaluated on runtime containment, not on whether a role exists in the directory. That will push IAM and PAM owners to coordinate more tightly with cloud, application, and security operations teams.

Practitioners who are already mapping machine identities against lifecycle events should use the Ultimate Guide to NHIs to anchor programme design, then extend the same model to autonomous systems and future agent workflows.

For practitioners

• Inventory all high-risk non-human identities Map service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, and workload identities to owners, systems, and business purpose. Prioritise credentials that appear in code, CI/CD, third-party integrations, or shared pipelines.
• Separate agent permissions from human entitlements Do not mirror user roles directly into agent or workload access. Define task-scoped access boundaries, and require explicit approval paths for actions that can change data, infrastructure, or downstream permissions.
• Measure identity blast radius before the next review cycle Assess which identities can reach the largest number of systems, records, or administrative functions. Use that ranking to decide where to tighten privilege, reduce standing access, and accelerate revocation.
• Align identity governance to runtime telemetry Tie privileged activity, secret use, and agent actions to monitoring that can detect unusual access paths in real time. Calendar-based review alone will miss short-lived or fast-moving abuse patterns.
• Rework offboarding for machine and agent identities Treat retirement, handoff, and service replacement as identity events, not infrastructure chores. Revoke unused credentials, remove delegated access, and confirm that downstream integrations no longer trust the retired identity.

Key takeaways

• The report shows identity security moving from administrative control to runtime risk management as agentic AI, NHIs, and breach pressure rise together.
• Visibility remains the weak point, because most organisations still cannot fully account for the service accounts and credentials that now carry the highest exposure.
• Practitioners should respond by reducing standing privilege, improving inventory, and measuring identity blast radius across human, machine, and agentic actors.

Key terms

• Agentic AI Identity: The complete set of credentials, permissions, and governance controls applied to an autonomous AI agent — covering authentication, authorisation, action logging, and access revocation. Distinct from traditional NHI because agent identities are often ephemeral, delegated, and multi-hop.
• Non-Human Identity (NHI): A digital identity assigned to a non-human entity such as a software application, service account, API key, bot, machine, or AI agent that enables it to authenticate and interact with systems without direct human involvement. NHIs now outnumber human identities in most enterprises by 25 to 50 times.
• Identity Blast Radius: The amount of damage a compromised identity can cause across systems, data, and infrastructure. In NHI environments, it is shaped by permissions, network reach, and administrative capability rather than by the credential alone. Reducing blast radius is a containment strategy that limits lateral movement and data exposure.
• Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is access that remains active even when no immediate task requires it. For NHI programmes, it is a common failure mode because long-lived credentials and persistent roles create unnecessary exposure. Reducing standing privilege usually means tighter expiry, on-demand access, and clearer review of who or what still needs access.

What's in the full report

C1.ai's full blog covers the survey detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• The full respondent breakdown by industry, including where identity incidents and AI adoption were most concentrated.
• The report's comparative year-over-year trend lines for AI agents, identity-driven attacks, and NHI urgency.
• The original wording behind the report's framing of controlled speed and operational pressure.
• The broader survey context around budgeting, stress, and security team priorities.

👉 C1.ai's full post includes the survey context, respondent mix, and the detailed takeaway narrative behind these findings.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.