Topic starter
25/06/2026 12:00 am
TL;DR: Access management is now being judged against autonomous and machine access patterns, not just human login journeys, and Ping Identity’s 2025 Gartner results highlight strong placement across workforce, partner, and machine access management, alongside explicit attention to AI-driven identity fraud, decentralized identity, and agentic AI identity management according to Ping Identity.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Ping Identity: “Upper-Right in the Magic Quadrant™. Top Scores in the Critical Capabilities.”.
By the numbers:
- Ping Identity was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management for the ninth consecutive year.
Key questions
Q: How should IAM teams govern AI agent access differently from human developer access?
A: IAM teams should govern AI agents as runtime consumers of access, not as users with durable credentials.
Q: Why do machine identities need to be part of access management decisions?
A: Because machine identities now sit on the same trust paths as people.
Q: What breaks when AI agents and humans share the same access model?
A: When AI agents and humans share the same access model, organisations lose clean attribution, stronger approval boundaries, and reliable review evidence.
Practitioner guidance
- Map AI agents to a distinct identity class Inventory where agents, workloads, and service accounts can act without human intervention, and separate those paths from standard workforce access so policy and review are not conflated.
- Scope delegated authority before deployment Define the exact APIs, tools, and data domains an AI agent may use, and remove any default inheritance that would let a prompt or workflow expand its access boundary.
- Review machine access as a governance domain Establish lifecycle ownership for machine and partner access so creation, change, revocation, and audit are handled with the same discipline as user access.
Bottom line: AI agents and machine identities are pushing IAM beyond human-centric sign-in design and into delegated authority governance.
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This topic was modified 19 hours ago by NHI Mgmt Group
25/06/2026 8:49 am
Machine access management is now a core IAM control plane, not a niche admin function. The Gartner results highlighted in this article show that enterprises are being evaluated on how well they govern machine access alongside workforce and partner access. That matters because machine identities do not fit neatly into older user-centric operating models, and they often become the fastest path to unbounded system access when governance is weak. Practitioners should treat machine access as a first-class identity domain, not a technical exception.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 19% of organisations give AI systems dramatically more access than human employees, nearly one in five granting unrestricted privilege, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can organisations tell whether access governance is keeping up with AI adoption?
A: Look for evidence that every AI-enabled access path has an owner, a policy, and a revocation process. If teams can only describe the platform and not the identities behind it, governance is lagging. Metrics such as uncovered tools, orphaned permissions, and stale delegated access show whether control is real or merely documented.
👉 Read our full editorial: Access management for AI agents is reshaping IAM priorities
This post was modified 19 hours ago by NHI Mgmt Group