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02/06/2026 6:52 pm
TL;DR: Two-thirds of enterprises already have AI agents in production, and many teams still handle them like service accounts with a credential and a handoff, according to Orchid Security and Team8’s 2025 CISO Village Survey. That leaves a widening gap between intended access and what agents actually do, which makes execution visibility the real control point.
NHIMG editorial — what this means for NHI practitioners
By the numbers:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern AI agents that inherit delegated access?
A: Security teams should govern AI agents as runtime identities, not just as credentials attached to a workflow.
Q: Why do AI agents create more risk than ordinary service accounts?
A: AI agents create more risk because they can chain actions across systems, reuse inherited permissions, and operate at machine speed while appearing technically authorized.
Q: How do you know if agent identity controls are actually working?
A: Look for whether you can reconstruct a complete path from trigger to identity to permission to action.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every agent to an originating owner and trigger Record which human or workflow initiated the agent, what delegated identity it inherits, and which business function it represents.
- Correlate runtime actions to active permissions Log the permissions that were live at the moment of execution, then compare them with the permissions the agent actually used across applications.
- Move review to the application execution layer Do not rely only on directory policies and periodic access recertification.
Practitioners should align agent monitoring with the Zero Trust model and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework?
👉 Read Orchid Security's analysis of agentic identity and runtime access →
Explore further
02/06/2026 7:05 pm
Agentic identity creates an execution gap, not just an access gap. Traditional IAM can confirm entitlement, but it cannot on its own prove what an agent did after delegation began. That matters because agents behave differently from static NHIs: they can combine permissions, move laterally through workflows, and inherit stale access in ways that look legitimate on paper. Practitioners should treat runtime traceability as a core control, not an audit luxury.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, with 77% of these incidents resulting in tangible damage. That combination shows why remediation speed matters as much as detection.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should teams do when an AI agent uses access that looks technically valid?
A: Teams should verify whether the access was still appropriate for the agent's intended task, not only whether the credential was valid. The first response is to contain the agent's reachable scope, review the delegated chain, and remove any stale or inherited permissions that were not required for the workflow.
👉 Read our full editorial: Agentic identity exposes the gap between intended and actual access
