AI readiness gap: are your identity controls keeping up?

AI readiness is now an identity problem before it is a tooling problem. The report shows that adoption has already outrun governance, which means the real constraint is not whether AI exists but whether identity can classify, control, and revoke it consistently. When access is fragmented, security teams lose the ability to distinguish sanctioned from unsanctioned use, and the programme becomes reactive by design. Practitioners should treat unified identity as the control boundary for AI adoption.

A few things that frame the scale:

• 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to the 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
• Only 19.6% of security professionals express strong confidence in their organisation's ability to securely manage non-human workload identities.

A question worth separating out:

Q: How can organisations tell whether AI readiness is actually improving?

A: They should test whether every AI-related identity has a clear owner, a defined access scope, and a fast revocation path. If sanctioned and unsanctioned AI both appear in the same environment but cannot be separated in logs or policy, readiness is still immature. Mature programmes can answer who accessed what, and remove it quickly.

👉 Read our full editorial: AI readiness is lagging behind adoption in enterprise IT