AI Adoption Forces Compromise Between Speed and Identity Security, Study Finds
AI adoption is forcing enterprises to trade security for speed– and identity controls are the very first casualty, according to a new report from Delinea, a provider of identity security services for both human and AI representative identities.
An essential finding in the 2026 Identity Security Report says 90% of organizations are requiring their security teams to loosen identity controls for AI.
In easier terms, organizations are focusing on speed over security in deploying AI tools, with management focused on faster adoption to drive productivity gains.
The significant issue is that it leaves organizations greatly exposed to security vulnerabilities. Enterprises are fast-tracking AI initiatives, despite considerable gaps in AI identity discovery, monitoring, and opportunity control.
“The pressure to move quickly on AI is genuine, however identity governance has not kept up, which exposes enterprises to considerable threat,” stated Delinia CEO Art Gilliland.
Over 2,000 IT decision-makers actively utilizing or piloting AI were surveyed by Delinea. According to the report, 90% of respondents had at least one identity presence gap, with the largest gap connected to machine and non-human identities (NHIs), consisting of accounts utilized by AI representatives.
“As AI representatives multiply across enterprise environments, these identities frequently have the least oversight,” Gilliland said. “The companies that will be successful in the AI period will be the ones that impose real-time, contextual gain access to throughout every human, maker, and agentic AI identity.”
Other findings from the report include:
- AI growth is driving non-human identity risk: 42% of companies said AI growth has been among the leading factors increasing NHI danger in the previous 12 months, far going beyond increased automation and CI/CD velocity (26%) and development in cloud-native workloads (26%).
- Limited exposure into fortunate AI actions: 80% of companies said they are unable constantly to comprehend why an NHI carried out a privileged action, highlighting significant challenges with traceability and responsibility for automated identities.
- Standing access remains the standard: 59% of companies reported lacking viable options to standing privileged access for NHIs and AI agents, increasing the risk that automated identities keep persistent permissions that could be exploited.
The outcome of all this is that standard identity protections haven’t kept up with AI and loosening identity controls has supplied bad actors with a tremendously larger attack surface area.
The report concluded that AI will continue to break standard security designs as business allow their security manages to grow lax and more identities and gain access to points appear.
“Plainly, companies can’t afford to slow down AI adoption,” Delinea said. “But the research study indicates that identity security should develop alongside AI adoption.”
The full report is readily available here on the Delinea site.