Time to Rethink Privileged Access for Machines and AI Agents
Security Boulevard, Thursday, May 14th, 2026
For years, Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) have been treated as foundational and a solved security challenge. Organizations deployed vaults, enforced policies, and checked the compliance box for their privileged users.
Fast forward to today, and that model no longer holds up.
What's emerging now is not an incremental shift, but a structural one. Identity is no longer centered on people. It is expanding rapidly across machines, software, and increasingly, autonomous AI agents. With that expansion comes a new category of risk. One that legacy PAM was never designed to address.