Privileged Access Management (PAM) has always been about protecting the keys to the kingdom. For decades the focus was on human administrators such as database admins, network engineers, and cloud operators whose elevated accounts could unlock every system in the enterprise. PAM tools were built to vault their credentials, monitor their sessions, and enforce just in time access to keep organizations safe.
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But the world has changed. It is projected by 2027, in enterprise the number of non human identities such as service accounts, workloads, bots, and AI agents will outnumber human users by 25 to 1 in large organizations.
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In some AI driven environments non human credentials increase 50 percent annually. These identities are not secondary actors. They run pipelines move sensitive data and make privileged changes faster and at greater scale than people ever could. Yet most organizations govern them poorly if at all.
The result is a dangerous governance gap. Traditional PAM was never designed for machines and agents that spin up in milliseconds call thousands of API requests per minute or persist as long lived service accounts with broad entitlements. This gap leads to surprising breaches regulatory non compliance and business risk.
That is why we need a new lens: PAM for Non Human Identities (NHI) a category focused on securing machines bots and agents with the same rigor reserved for humans.
Non human identities are no longer a small technical detail. They have become the majority inside modern enterprises. Analysts estimate today that between 60 and 80 percent of all identities in large organizations are now non human (trending to 25:1 by 2030). These include service accounts for databases, workload identities in Kubernetes clusters, automation scripts, robotic process automation bots, and increasingly AI agents embedded into business workflows.
The growth rate is accelerating. A single AI powered application can spin up hundreds of temporary tokens per hour as it queries vector databases, fetches data from APIs, and invokes model endpoints. In DevOps pipelines, non human credentials are created and destroyed continuously to connect build systems, test environments, and deployment targets. In cloud environments, ephemeral workloads often hold elevated privileges without clear ownership.
This scale creates three critical problems:
The result is a surface area that is growing faster than traditional PAM systems can handle. What once was a niche concern for a few service accounts has now become the dominant identity governance challenge in enterprises adopting automation and AI.
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Non human identities already outnumber people in the enterprise and are growing at machine speed. Without new controls they represent the largest blind spot in privileged access today.
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Finance bot with broad entitlements
A finance automation bot retrieves invoices. Without scoped access, it also pulls sensitive payroll data. With NHI PAM: issue a short-lived credential scoped only to invoices, block payroll access.
AI support agent leaking credit card data
A customer support agent built on LangChain queries a ticket DB. It accidentally returns full credit card numbers in its responses. With NHI PAM: enforce masking rules at runtime, allow only last four digits to pass.
DevOps pipeline exfiltrating secrets
A CI/CD pipeline stores API keys in scripts. Keys are leaked to a public repo. With NHI PAM: pipeline gets ephemeral secrets valid for minutes, automatically revoked when build finishes.