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06/09/2026 6:21 pm
TL;DR: AI agents are entering enterprise environments faster than security teams can track them, and Gartner says organisations still lack unified identity visibility across fragmented data sources, making access decisions and shadow-agent discovery harder. The practical problem is not visibility alone but whether teams can turn identity telemetry into governed action before technical debt and attack surface expand, according to AuthMind.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by AuthMind: Gartner's Innovation Insight on Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms
By the numbers:
- By 2028, organizations will rely on IVIP capabilities to inform both cybersecurity and business decisions.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern AI agents that use multiple identity layers?
A: Security teams should inventory every identity layer an agent can use, including static credentials, session identities, embedded tool identities, and any delegated relationships between agents.
Q: When should organisations prioritise posture management for NHIs and AI agents?
A: Prioritise it before large-scale deployment, not after incidents or budget reviews.
Q: How do organisations know whether identity visibility is actually improving?
A: Look for faster answers to access questions, fewer unresolved toxic combinations, better ownership coverage, and a smaller gap between what separate tools report and what the enterprise access model shows.
Practitioner guidance
- Map identity coverage by actor type Separate human identities, service accounts, and AI agents in your visibility model so discovery gaps are obvious at the governance layer, not hidden inside one combined inventory.
- Require remediation paths for every identity signal Link each alert, discovery event, or access anomaly to a defined response such as ticketing, revocation, workflow escalation, or containment.
- Detect shadow agents through activity correlation Use cross-system telemetry from cloud, identity, endpoint, and application sources to identify identities that are active but not properly governed.
What's in the full article
AuthMind's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The specific way AuthMind correlates cloud, network, identity system, and endpoint telemetry into an Identity Access Flow Graph.
- How the automation engine routes findings into tickets, SOC workflows, or access revocation actions.
- The vendor's explanation of how its model distinguishes human, NHI, and agentic AI activity in one view.
- The full context behind Gartner's IVIP category and the representative provider listing.
👉 Read AuthMind's analysis of Gartner's IVIP category and AI agent visibility →
Identity visibility and AI agents: what IAM teams need now?
Explore further
06/09/2026 6:21 pm
Continuous identity visibility is now a governance requirement, not a reporting layer. Gartner's framing reflects a reality identity teams already know: if access state cannot be correlated across systems, governance decisions are built on partial truth. That failure affects IAM, IGA, PAM, and NHI programmes at the same time because the estate is shared. The practitioner conclusion is that visibility must be treated as a control plane input, not a retrospective dashboard.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Our research also shows that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which means visibility gaps quickly become blast-radius problems.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should IAM teams prioritise before AI agents are widely deployed?
A: They should prioritise continuous identity correlation across all actor types, because agentic AI amplifies any existing visibility gap. If the organisation cannot see service accounts, tokens, and agent activity in one operational view, it will not be able to govern runtime access safely once AI usage scales.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity visibility gaps are slowing AI agent governance
