AI is not coming. It’s already sitting in your environment.
Not as a chatbot. As something more dangerous and more useful. An agent.
An agent can take actions. It can pull data. It can send email. It can open tickets. It can query systems. It can automate workflows. It can do what employees do, except faster, longer, and without boredom.
That’s the part everyone celebrates.
Here’s the part they miss. Agents require access. And access is where everything breaks.
Agents behave like humans, but scale like machines
A human might make one mistake a week.
An agent can make a mistake a thousand times before lunch.
A human might forget to close a session.
An agent might run nonstop, with persistent tokens, forever.
So when organizations bolt agents onto existing systems without governance, they don’t just add productivity. They add a new class of identity that is often overprivileged and underowned.
That is the real risk.
The three questions leadership has to ask
If you are a CEO, board member, or executive, these are the questions that matter:
-
Who owns the agent?
A real person. Not “the IT team.” -
What can it reach?
Not what you think it can do. What it can actually access across systems. -
When does access get revoked?
What is the off switch? What happens when the owner leaves? When the project ends? When the vendor relationship changes?
If the answers are not immediate, you do not have governance. You have a science fair project inside the business.
Agent sprawl is the next shadow IT
Most organizations already struggle with shadow IT. Users adopt tools because work needs to get done.
Agentic AI is going to accelerate that behavior. People will spin up agents because it saves time. They will connect them to mail, files, chat, ticketing, CRM, and everything else.
Permissions will be broad because narrow permissions break demos.
Then the agent becomes critical to operations. Nobody wants to touch it. Nobody wants to own it. It just sits there, quietly privileged, quietly persistent.
That’s agent sprawl. It creates always-on overprivileged identities.
Attackers do not need your agent to become sentient. They just need its access.
What responsible AI deployment looks like
Good governance is not complicated. It’s just unpopular because it slows down deployment.
Here are the basics:
-
Treat every agent as an identity
Give it a lifecycle. Owner. Purpose. Expiration. -
Least privilege by default
Only grant what it needs for the task. Expand slowly. Document why. -
Time-bound access
If the agent needs admin access, it should be temporary, audited, and justified. -
Central inventory and approval
No agent should exist outside visibility. -
Logging and monitoring
Agents should produce investigation-grade logs. If something goes wrong, you need to reconstruct actions quickly.
If you can do those things, AI becomes a force multiplier for the business. If you cannot, AI becomes a force multiplier for the attacker.
Closing
AI does not break security because it is magical. It breaks security because it demands access, and most organizations still don’t govern access well.
Agentic AI is not primarily a model problem. It’s an identity problem.
Ownership. Reach. Revocation.
If you solve those three, you can use AI aggressively and responsibly.
If you do not, you are building high-speed automation on top of a trust model that was already cracking.
If you want help putting guardrails around agents, integrations, tokens, and non-human identities, Critical Path Security can help you build a program that moves as fast as the business, without turning your environment into a roulette wheel.