Written by Ido Shlomo, Co-Founder and CTO, Token Security
AI assistants are no longer summarizing meeting notes, writing emails, and answering questions. They’re taking action, such as opening tickets, analyzing logs, managing accounts, and even automatically fixing incidents.
Welcome to the age of agentic AI, which doesn’t just tell you what to do next - it does it for you. These agents are incredibly powerful, but they’re also introducing an entirely new kind of security risk.
The Quiet Rise of Autonomous Agents
Initially, AI adoption within companies seemed benign. Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot assisted people with basic writing and coding, but didn’t act independently. That’s changing quickly.
Without security reviews or approval, teams are deploying autonomous AI systems that can interpret goals, plan steps, call APIs, and invoke other agents. An AI marketing assistant can now analyze campaign performance data and actively optimize targeting and budget. A DevOps agent can scan for incidents and start remediation without waiting for a human.
The result? A growing class of agents that make decisions and take actions faster than people can monitor them.
It’s Not “Just Another Bot”
While organizations have started managing Non-Human Identities (NHIs), such as service accounts and API keys, agentic AI doesn’t fit this same mold.
Unlike a workflow, which follows a predictable series of actions, an AI agent reasons about what to do next. It’s capable of chaining multiple steps together, accessing different systems, and adjusting its plan along the way. That flexibility is what makes agents both powerful and dangerous. Because agents can act across boundaries, the simple act of giving them access to a database, a CRM, and Slack could make them among the most powerful users in the company.
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