After a few years of widespread artificial intelligence adoption, 2026 will mark the tipping point when artificial intelligence moves beyond influencing how we work and starts fundamentally reshaping the enterprise itself.
AI is now embedded at every layer of an organization: from workflows and applications to customer experience, DevOps, IT automation, and strategic decision-making. But governance, security controls, and identity protections have not kept pace. The result is a growing set of blind spots, rapidly expanding attack surfaces, and a widening speed gap between defenders and increasingly automated adversaries.
Delinea leaders predict that 2026 will force a new identity security playbook to be built for a world where AI systems, machine identities, and autonomous agents outnumber humans, operate at machine speed, and increasingly make decisions beyond direct human oversight.
Below, Delinea’s executives share their top insights on the identity-driven shifts they see reshaping enterprise security in the year ahead.
Predicted by Art Gilliland, CEO
In 2026, artificial intelligence will expose a hard truth security teams can no longer ignore: identity, not networks or endpoints, is the primary control surface for AI-driven risk
Organizations that continue to treat identity as a static access problem will fall behind attackers who exploit AI-powered automation, credential abuse, and identity sprawl. The enterprises that succeed will be those that re-architect identity security as a continuous, data-aware control plane, one built to govern humans, machines, and AI with the same rigor, visibility, and accountability.
Shadow IT has plagued security teams for years, but 2026 will be the year shadow AI overtakes it as the top visibility and breach risk.
As CEOs push for rapid AI adoption, nearly every department is experimenting with AI tools, often without security guardrails. More than half of organizations run into shadow AI issues monthly, and that figure is rising as easy-to-use AI systems spread across business units.
Unlike traditional shadow IT, shadow AI is both more powerful and more dangerous. Employees can deploy advanced models trained on sensitive company data, and these tools often store or transmit privileged credentials, API keys, and service tokens without oversight. Even sanctioned AI tools become risky when improperly configured or connected to internal workflows.
This creates a new identity blind spot.
CISOs face a dual challenge:
The priority isn’t just securing AI. It’s finding it. Visibility will be the defining challenge of the year.
Predicted by Art Gilliland
AI is radically lowering the barrier to sophisticated offensive cyber capabilities. In 2026, that shift will reshape the geopolitical threat landscape.
Smaller nations and proxy groups no longer need massive intelligence infrastructures or elite cyber armies to execute high-impact attacks. AI-enabled tooling allows them to:
We’ve already seen early signs of how asymmetric cyber power can play out. Ukraine showed the world that a smaller state can inflict significant damage remotely using advanced cyber tactics.
With AI-driven automation, sophisticated playbooks previously reserved for top-tier nation-states become accessible to countries—and non-state actors—with far fewer resources. This levels the playing field and expands the number of threat actors capable of meaningful, identity-focused cyber aggression.
In 2026, expect more geopolitical disruptions driven by identity warfare, synthetic information, and AI-enabled critical infrastructure targeting.
If 2025 was the year organizations embraced AI, 2026 will be the year they lose track of it.
Machine identities—from workloads and service accounts to IoT devices and AI agents—already vastly outnumber human identities. Most operate with excessive privileges. Many run unnoticed and unmonitored. And nearly all are essential to keeping systems running.
Machine identities have become the primary source of privilege misuse, and their growth shows no sign of slowing. As AI-driven automation accelerates and IoT ecosystems proliferate, organizations will hit a governance tipping point.
2026 will force security teams to confront a tough reality. Identity-first security can’t stop with humans. Machines often carry more privilege, access more systems, and create more risk than people do.
The organizations that thrive will be those that extend identity security, least privilege, and lifecycle management to every non-human identity without slowing development or operations.
Predicted by Pierre Mouallem
As AI continues to influence business operations, regulators will focus on how organizations authorize, monitor, and audit AI-driven systems.
In 2026, compliance expectations will expand significantly across major frameworks. Compliance frameworks such as SOX, the UK Corporate Governance Code, and the EU AI Act, along with evolving standards from NIST and ISO, will expand to cover “machine identity hygiene” and AI decision-making transparency.
AI isn’t just a technological risk; it’s becoming a corporate accountability risk
Machine governance will move from a technical issue to a board-level priority. Executives must show they can audit AI behavior, enforce identity controls, and prove the integrity of AI-driven actions.
2026 will demand a fundamentally different approach to identity security. CISOs and security leaders should prioritize:
Shadow AI must be discovered before it can be controlled.
Apply least privilege, credential rotation, monitoring, and governance to every non-human identity.
AI-native threats require AI-powered detection and response.
Every action—human or machine—must be verified in real time.
Auditability, explainability, and machine identity hygiene will become essential.
To learn more, download Delinea’s report: AI in Identity Security Demands a New Playbook