AI Adoption Forces Compromise In Between Speed and Identity Security, Study Finds
AI adoption is forcing business to trade security for speed– and identity controls are the first casualty, according to a brand-new report from Delinea, a company of identity security services for both human and AI agent identities.
A key finding in the 2026 Identity Security Report states 90% of organizations are forcing their security groups to loosen up identity controls for AI.
In easier terms, organizations are focusing on speed over security in releasing AI tools, with leadership concentrated on faster adoption to drive efficiency gains.
The major problem is that it leaves companies greatly exposed to security vulnerabilities. Enterprises are fast-tracking AI efforts, in spite of considerable spaces in AI identity discovery, tracking, and advantage control.
“The pressure to move fast on AI is real, however identity governance has actually not kept up, which exposes enterprises to substantial danger,” stated Delinia CEO Art Gilliland.
Over 2,000 IT decision-makers actively utilizing or piloting AI were surveyed by Delinea. According to the report, 90% of respondents had at least one identity presence space, with the biggest space tied to device and non-human identities (NHIs), including accounts used by AI representatives.
“As AI representatives increase across business environments, these identities typically have the least oversight,” Gilliland said. “The companies that will be successful in the AI era will be the ones that implement real-time, contextual access across every human, machine, and agentic AI identity.”
Other findings from the report include:
- AI expansion is driving non-human identity danger: 42% of companies stated AI expansion has actually been one of the top factors increasing NHI danger in the past 12 months, far exceeding increased automation and CI/CD velocity (26%) and development in cloud-native workloads (26%).
- Limited presence into fortunate AI actions: 80% of companies said they are not able always to understand why an NHI performed a privileged action, highlighting significant obstacles with traceability and responsibility for automated identities.
- Standing access stays the norm: 59% of organizations reported doing not have viable options to standing privileged gain access to for NHIs and AI representatives, increasing the threat that automated identities maintain consistent consents that could be made use of.
The result of all this is that traditional identity securities haven’t stayed up to date with AI and loosening up identity controls has actually offered bad actors with an exponentially larger attack surface area.
The report concluded that AI will continue to break standard security models as business enable their security controls to grow lax and more identities and gain access to points appear.
“Plainly, organizations can’t pay for to decrease AI adoption,” Delinea stated. “But the research study suggests that identity security should develop alongside AI adoption.”
The full report is offered here on the Delinea site.