SailPoint Report Finds 79% of Enterprises Run AI Agents in Production, Yet Only 2% Have Deployed Purpose-built Security
Key Highlights
- ➤79% of organizations run AI agents in production, but only 2% use purpose-built security
- ➤AI agents comprise 22% of non-human accounts; 85% rely on legacy identity tools
- ➤Only 15% can provision non-human access in real time
- ➤62% securing non-human identities report productivity gains; 46% report safer, faster AI deployment
Expert Statements
Wendy Wu, Chief Marketing Officer at SailPoint
“Compressing a five-year maturity curve into a single year presents a massive operational challenge, starting with a fundamental awareness gap. Many organizations don't yet realize that they do not have the right tools purpose-built for the scale and velocity of agent and non-human identity security. You cannot bridge this gap by asking human-speed tools to work faster; security must be built for machine speed from the ground up, with discovery, ownership, and access decisions happening in real time rather than on a quarterly review cycle. Enterprises waiting for their agent programs to mature the way their human programs did are going to find out the hard way that they don't have five years.”
AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today from its annual Navigate conference, SailPoint, Inc. (Nasdaq: SAIL), a leader in enterprise identity security, released its fifth annual Horizons of Identity Security report, revealing that enterprise AI adoption has dramatically outpaced the identity security controls needed to govern it. The study finds that while 79% of organizations are now running AI agents in production, a mere 2% are using identity security tools specifically designed to manage and govern them — a 40-to-1 gap that exposes businesses to significant risk.
This gap is driven by a stark divergence in security maturity between human and non-human identities. While organizations have made impressive strides with human security—nearly halving those at Horizon 1 maturity from 45% in 2022 to just 23% today—the explosion of autonomous AI agents has introduced a new deficit. Agent identity starts from a steep lag, with 54% of organizations currently sitting at Horizon 1. With AI agents already active in production, enterprises do not have the luxury of a five-year runway to catch up; they must compress a five-year human security curve into a one-year agent timeline.
Get started
Create a free account to read the full story.