Microsoft's forecast estimates there will be around 1.3 billion AI agents active in enterprises by 2028.

These AI agents represent a distinct new workforce. 🤖 For those of us already dealing with service account sprawl, imagining a billion autonomous identities running at machine speed highlights a significant challenge ahead.

The conversation is moving quickly, and several points stand out:

✔️ AI agents are emerging as a new identity category. We need to shift our thinking from traditional "user personas" to "agent personas." Current IAM approaches aren’t designed for agents with autonomous behaviours and short-lived lifecycles.

✔️ Zero Trust needs to encompass AI. Cisco’s presence at RSAC underscored this with their focus on agent registration, ongoing policy enforcement, and assigning accountable human owners.

✔️ Automation is essential. Managing identity lifecycles at the speed and scale AI agents require calls for automation. Using Okta Workflows to handle onboarding, permissions, and decommissioning on GCP infrastructure is a practical way to reduce risk here. 💡

The adoption gap is notable. Cisco’s research indicates while most enterprises are experimenting with AI agents, very few have deployed them securely in production.

For IAM and cloud leaders, evolving identity strategies to manage this new type of workforce is becoming a priority.

Preparing policies for the agent workforce will be a major focus area moving forward.