The governance challenge at the heart of modern enterprise security isn’t just about protecting human accounts anymore. Service accounts, API keys, and increasingly autonomous AI agents are accessing sensitive systems around the clock – often with more standing privilege than they need and far less oversight than they warrant.
The gap, then, between how fast these systems are being deployed and how well they’re being governed is widening – and fast.
The numbers make it clear: according to a Cloud Security Alliance and Oasis Security report, 78% of organizations don’t have formal policies for creating or removing AI identities, 92% aren’t confident their legacy identity and access management tools can effectively manage the risks AI and non-human identities bring, and 79% said they had moderate or low confidence in their ability to govern them.
Meanwhile, non-human identities already outnumber humans by 50:1 in the average enterprise environment, with some analysts projecting that ratio will reach 80:1 within two years.
Britive, a Los Angeles-based privileged access management firm, has built its platform around closing that gap. In fact, the company announced in late February that its unified PAM solution is now integrated with the AWS Security Extended Plan, Amazon’s program that consolidates partner security solutions with AWS billing, support and deployment infrastructure.
The practical impact for enterprise and regulated-industry customers: Zero Standing Privileges enforcement across human users, machine identities, and agentic AI systems, all procured and managed through a single AWS relationship.
Britive’s platform mints short-lived credentials at runtime – when access is needed, not before – thus eliminating the persistent secrets that make compromised credentials so valuable to attackers.
Agentic identity is no longer a niche concern
The challenge Britive is addressing has moved from technical obscurity to board-level urgency in a matter of months. A Dark Reading readership poll found that 48% of cybersecurity professionals identify agentic AI and autonomous systems as the top attack vector in 2026, outranking deepfakes, board-level cyber recognition, and passwordless adoption.
The reasons aren’t hard to find: AI agents are already inside the enterprise. The emergence of agentic AI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) frameworks enables AI to access services, execute tasks, and interact across platforms, blurring the boundaries between human and non-human digital actors.
Gartner projects that by 2028, a third of generative AI interactions will involve autonomous agents that act, decide, and execute independently. The problem, then, is that organizations are deploying these capabilities faster than they’re governing them.
Industry analysts are already warning that some early AI agent deployments will get pushed into production with inadequate security guardrails or over-permissioned agents, and that this year will especially see AI agents touching core business processes – potentially including some high-profile breaches originating from those agents.
The recommendation from identity security researchers is pointed: treat this as a now problem, not a roadmap.
The integration – and what it means
Art Poghosyan, Britive’s co-founder and CEO, spoke of integration as a shift from passive monitoring to active enforcement. The firm’s platform connects identity discovery, policy governance, and runtime privilege generation, covering the full lifecycle rather than addressing any one piece in isolation.
“Customers move beyond passive monitoring. They can now identify risk through a unified identity registry, govern it via a common policy engine, and execute runtime enforcement to mint dynamic, ephemeral privileges at the moment of request,” he said.
Marqueta, which uses Britive to manage access across human, service, and agentic identities, pointed to AWS alignment as a key benefit. Having Britive accessible within Security Hub means access controls can be governed alongside the company’s broader AWS security investments from a single control plane – a consolidation play that matters increasingly as security teams are asked to do more with constrained resources.
Featured image: Courtesy of Britive.
Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.