AI readiness gap: are your identity controls keeping up?

Unified identity is now the minimum viable security model for AI adoption. The article correctly shows that readiness is not the same as enthusiasm, and that distinction is now central to IAM planning. When AI is adopted faster than access governance, identity becomes the first control plane to fail, because policy can no longer be enforced consistently across people, bots, and agents. Practitioners should treat unification as the operating assumption, not an optimization.

A few things that frame the scale:

• Only 13% of organisations feel extremely prepared for the reality of agentic AI despite the majority racing toward autonomous adoption, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
• Organisations that describe themselves as confident in their AI deployment actually experience a 72% security incident rate, compared to 33% for those who remain cautious, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.

A question worth separating out:

Q: Should organisations rework IAM when AI systems begin to act on data?

A: Yes, because AI-connected workflows turn permissions into a runtime risk. IAM teams need to review delegated access, enforce least privilege, and make sure entitlements are traceable to an accountable owner. Without that, AI systems can inherit access that was never designed for autonomous or semi-autonomous use.

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