Extended Access Management for AI agents

Whether you know it or not, AI agents are likely being adopted in your organization. And it’s easy to see why. AI agents have the potential to automate and simplify everything from customer service, cybersecurity, IT automation, SaaS workflows, to data processing tasks. If you read that as “the ability to transform the ways we work” — you’re right. AI agents represent nothing less than a sea change to the future of business.

While they offer great promise for automating tasks, they pose a unique challenge for security and IT teams. Access from AI agents to internal systems must be secure, monitored, and compliant, and machine-to-machine access must be rethought. There is a real urgency to solving the access management challenges of AI agents. They’re already being adopted in enterprise workflows, autonomously making decisions, triggering tasks, interacting with other applications, and even interacting with customers — often without oversight. According to Gartner, by 2028, a third of interactions with generative AI (GenAI) services will invoke action models and autonomous agents for task completion. (Gartner, TSP 2025 Trends: Agentic AI – The Evolution of Experience, February 2025.)

That means this shift is happening as we speak–and it introduces a new layer of risk that many traditional approaches to security, such as IAM, can’t see, let alone control.

What are AI agents—and why are they important?

AI agents are a new class of software that act independently. For example, they can book meetings, analyze customer feedback, pull reports, and even manage workflows across tools like Salesforce, GitHub, Slack, and internal databases.

One significant difference between standard workflows and AI agents is that they’re not static. They don’t wait for a user to act. They interpret goals, make decisions, and act in real time.

Unsurprisingly, the ability to take action, potentially across multiple sensitive systems, also means that AI agents introduce significant security risks to organizations.

Why AI agents pose a security risk

AI agents introduce a slew of security challenges to an organization. While standards and best practices exist for securing credentials for employees, most have yet to define them for AI agents acting on their behalf. For example, poor security controls may be a gating issue for enterprise adoption of AI agents, there are minimal best practices around handling of credentials or even auditing agent access, and MFA may need to be disabled given it requires human input.

AI agents often use hardcoded credentials or share user tokens, bypassing access policies and audit trails. This can create problems for your security team:

• No visibility into what AI agents are doing or what data they can access, creating security blind spots
• No governance around agent permissions or credential usage, creating compliance short-comings
• No easy way to revoke access if an agent is compromised or no longer needed, undermining least-privilege access policy

These problems compound when there is a need for granular visibility and auditing in order to meet compliance requirements. It becomes extremely difficult to maintain compliance without clear visibility into what is being done.

AI Agents and the failure of traditional IAM

That brings us to the next challenge: Traditional security tools were built with a hardwired assumption that they would secure employees only. Extending to secure AI agents was not a design criteria. Traditional tools expect users to sign in manually and follow fixed rules. But AI agents work differently. They connect to systems automatically, adapt as they go, and work at machine speed. To do their job, they need fast, ongoing, and adaptive access to data — which traditional tools can’t handle.

The access management challenges of AI agents

The fundamental challenge: How do you provide secure, least-privilege access to an AI agent? AI agents lack a standardized identity model, which creates security and access risks as enterprises struggle to track, govern, and revoke AI agent credentials. This challenge is complex, given it also has significant, cross-functional requirements across security, IT, and engineering teams. For example:

• Security has new blind spots created by AI agents–for example, are their permissions misconfigured? Acting maliciously? Being exploited?
• IT must manage thousands of employee identities, and now they must also govern an untold number of AI agent identities and manage their access.
• Developers need to build connections between AI agents and services like Salesforce, GitHub, Slack, Box, and databases, but there’s no standard way for agents to access API keys.

Developers are especially under pressure to build and ship fast. But today’s SDKs and infrastructure aren’t designed with agentic AI in mind. So, developers rely on insecure workarounds:

• Hardcoded API keys
• Shared secrets
• Disabled MFA
• Environment variables with sensitive data

These shortcuts make it easy to get started, but they leave your organization exposed.

How 1Password® Extended Access Management helps secure AI agents

Whether you’re in IT or security, if your organization is building AI agents, you need to be thoughtful about how those agents are using credentials to access systems and data. This is where 1Password Extended Access Management comes in. 1Password Extended Access Management provides the tools, visibility, and control to grant AI agents secure access to sensitive credentials and private context, eliminating hardcoded secrets and persistent access. The platform also provides visibility into AI agent authentication and access events, helping your organization enforce secure access, reduce risk, and prevent data exposure.

Depending on where you sit in the organization, 1Password Extended Access Management platform provides tangible benefits:

For Security Leaders

• Prevent AI-driven credential leaks with secure authentication controls.
• Ensure AI agents authenticate securely—without bypassing MFA or creating compliance gaps.
• Gain visibility into AI agent authentication to reduce security risks and insider threats.
• Eliminate hardcoded AI credentials and enforce enterprise-wide security policies.

For IT & Identity Teams

• Simplify AI agent authentication with secure, centrally managed credentials.
• Eliminate manual tracking of AI agent access with proper governance controls.
• Ensure AI agents use approved authentication methods—without creating operational complexity.
• Support developers in building secure AI workflows without compromising speed or flexibility.

The bottom line

AI agents are changing how work gets done. However, guardrails and security must be incorporated from the start if you want to unlock their full potential. 1Password helps you manage Ai agent identities with the same rigor you apply to employees. You can learn more about these updates and how 1Password enables agentic AI security on our solutions page.

Dominic Garcia

Solutions Marketing, Director