"There are shadow agents running in almost every environment we look at," warns Cisco's VP of product for identity, who oversees the company's Duo Agentic Identity product designed to solve the problem.

Agentic AI promises to transform business strategy from the ground up. But it also poses a serious challenge to IT leaders. You don’t want to slow your teams down in experimenting with autonomous agents and miss a competitive window for productivity and revenue gains. At the same time, you’re navigating a technology that evolves from week to week and, at a scale many can’t even fathom, could be putting your systems at risk.

“Somewhere in your environment right now, an AI agent is almost certainly operating without a proper identity, a defined owner, or any meaningful access controls,” Cisco VP of Product for Identity Matt Caulfield, who leads the team behind Duo Agentic Identity, told ZDNET in an email. “Developers are already connecting these agents to production systems without looping in IT, and that is a massive security blind spot.”

Harnessing what agentic AI can do, without absorbing risk most organizations can’t yet quantify, is crucial for long-term strategy. This means rethinking identity management for your enterprise and reimagining what’s possible.

AI agents are autonomous actors, capable of querying databases, triggering workflows, sending communications, and making decisions on their own, at machine speed, sometimes with the option to forgo human permission or intervention. That autonomy is precisely what breaks the assumptions built into nearly every identity and access management system currently in use.

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