The rise of agentic AI isn’t just changing how we build software it’s fundamentally breaking our assumptions about identity, access, and accountability. As engineers, we’ve spent decades building identity systems around a simple premise: users are humans. That premise is now obsolete.
The Identity Model We Built Is Already Broken
Traditional IAM, PAM, and SSO tools were designed for a world where actions map cleanly to people. An employee logs in, performs tasks, logs out. Audit trails are straightforward. Authorization decisions are binary.