You can’t secure what you can’t see. That’s the problem with AI agents — they get created, do their job, and vanish faster than any human ever could. And a lot of them operate in the shadows.
Rekha Das, VP of Product Management at Saviynt, puts it bluntly: “Autonomous agents are motivated to do things. If they don’t have an identity themselves, then how do you figure out accountability?”
Traditional identity tools weren’t built for this. CMDBs and periodic inventories can’t keep up with AI agents that spin up, execute tasks, and disappear in seconds. Their permissions change as they interact with MCP servers, APIs, and other agents. By the time you’ve run a scan, the agent’s already gone.
That’s where Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) comes in. Instead of occasional check-ins, ISPM ingests metadata from AI platforms 24/7. It continuously discovers agents, flags orphaned ones without human owners, spots excessive privileges, and finds missing guardrails.
“Every hour, thousands of AI agents can be generated or built or created,” Das said. “All this requires continuous visibility.”
ISPM also assigns risk scores mapped to frameworks like NIST, OWASP, and MITRE. Security teams see exactly which agents to fix first.
Then there’s configuration drift. AI agents learn and adapt — which means their behavior can change over time. ISPM spots when an agent’s actions start deviating from its intended purpose. Left unchecked, minor drift becomes a major incident.
“Autonomous agents are the ones that are most dangerous,” Das said. “They’re not static, so you cannot just keep them in a repository and think that everything is okay.”
