Your AI strategy is only as good as your identity foundation

Consider the visibility of your current identity and access management (IAM). Does it look like Caribbean Sea water or more like a bayou?

If your answer leans toward the latter, visibility may be having a negative ripple effect on your governance and security. As AI is deployed across organizations, foundational identity challenges often arise.

That leads to questions like: How can teams manage autonomous agents? What category can AI agents exist in? How can IT teams mitigate agent sprawl?

We teamed up with JumpCloud to get some answers. Here’s what we found.

Agents galore

The identity explosion

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Nonhuman identities now outnumber human employees by an average of 82 to 1. And it’s causing 80% of organizations to be unprepared for the risks of unmanaged autonomous agents

Because of this explosion, there’s now a disconnect in the market. While 40% of organizations declare themselves AI-mature, only 22% possess the AI readiness to scale safely.

There’s clear consensus on the solution here: 85% of IT leaders agree that a unified IAM foundation is the prerequisite for AI readiness.

Bringing human and agent governance under the same umbrella is a critical safeguard against the security blind spots and compliance failures that come with managing these identities in silos. Without this foundation, every new AI deployment and agent is a risk multiplier rather than a productivity booster.

The gray area

The binary collapse

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Legacy IT systems manage two binary categories: humans (who are slow but have high judgement) and service accounts (which are fast but have zero judgement). But AI agents? They’ve collapsed this structure because they have human-like autonomy but machine-like speed.

This new category of identity requires a new playbook. The experts at JumpCloud suggest shifting from managing static permissions to governing autonomous behaviors. So rather than treating AI as a human peer or a simple script, IT teams implement agentic guardrails.

This means moving away from 'probabilistic' trust—aka hoping the AI behaves correctly—and toward deterministic control. By enforcing zero trust policies, agents are granted access only for the precise duration of a task.

Combined with human-in-the-loop validation for high-risk actions, IT ensures that AI speed never outpaces human oversight. It’s not too much autonomy and not too-restrictive autonomy. It’s juuuust right.

Exacerbated exposure

Shadow AI + visibility voids

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Currently, 61% of organizations struggle with shadow AI, aka unapproved agents processing sensitive data without oversight. A lack of visibility into AI usage and unmanaged agent sprawl creates critical security and compliance gaps.

Unification provides a clear path to resilience. By consolidating identity, device, and access management into a single platform, IT teams can eliminate the complexity that breeds security blind spots.

With a unified foundation acting as a 'single source of truth,' IT can discover, catalog, and govern every identity—human or machine—across the entire ecosystem. This centralized oversight doesn't just block unauthorized tools, it provides the continuous monitoring and auditability needed to ensure every AI action is traceable and compliant.

By consolidating identity, device, and access management, IT gains the total environmental control required to scale AI safely. And that enables IT to transform AI from a liability into what C-suites desperately want it to be: a value accelerator.

IT foundation 🤝 unification

The AI era doesn’t reward organizations that move fast and fix things later. Fortunately, a unified IT management platform (like JumpCloud’s) is built to help teams adapt safely, securely, and efficiently to the evolving demands IT teams are facing. From human users to autonomous bots, it enables you to secure every identity using a unified system.

Through proactive automated workflows, JumpCloud enforces security policies before problems arise, rather than after. Its discovery capabilities give teams full visibility into every AI identity operating across the environment, making it possible to build secure, scalable guardrails around access.