Guardian Agents: The Next Layer of Identity Governance

AI agents are autonomous programs that can reason, make decisions, and access multiple systems within enterprises, but the identity governance systems (IAM, or identity and access management, which controls who can access what) were designed for humans and fixed service accounts, not for dynamic autonomous actors. The core problem is that agents inherit all the permissions of the human or service identity they operate on behalf of and can access resources across many systems in a single session without traditional checkpoints, creating a governance gap that existing tools cannot see or control.