Identity and access management (IAM) governs how people, applications, and machines are authenticated and authorized to use digital resources. Historically, it has functioned as a login gatekeeper, but that model no longer holds. To support cloud-native systems and agentic AI, identity must evolve into dynamic control for autonomous software. The rapid growth of cloud services and agentic AI is driving an explosion of non-human identities (NHIs), often vastly outnumbering human ones. CyberArk reports roughly 82 machine identities for every human identity. These identities are non-human, short-lived, created at machine speed and often hold sensitive or privileged access. Despite this, 88% of organizations still define “privileged users” as human-only, even though 42% of machine identities already have privileged or sensitive access. This gap is widening as adoption accelerates. Gartner research indicates that enterprise software is rapidly embedding agentic AI capabilities, with autonomous decision-making …