How AuthMind Delivers on Gartner's Secure Delegation Model for AI Agents

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are rapidly moving from science fiction to business reality. They promise a future where digital assistants can book our travel, manage insurance enrollments, and complete complex online forms on our behalf, streamlining workflows and boosting productivity. But as we race to delegate tasks to these powerful new tools, we are overlooking a fundamental flaw that could prove catastrophic, how we grant them access to our systems and secure their activity.

A recent Gartner report focused on How to Securely Delegate Access From Humans to AI Agents highlights this critical challenge in the age of AI. How can organizations securely enable AI agents to act on behalf of humans?  As businesses deploy AI to handle everything from human resources to customer service, the fastest and most common method for granting access is having the human share their password with the agent. Gartner calls this practice "exceptionally high-risk" and strongly advises that cybersecurity leaders prohibit it to avoid severe security incidents and compliance issues.

This creates a dilemma, how can organizations innovate with AI without creating massive identity-related security risks? The answer lies in a new approach to identity security, one that provides deep visibility and real-time control over all identity activities. The AuthMind Identity Observability Platform is uniquely built to solve this problem, delivering the identity observability and proactive defense needed to secure human-to-AI collaboration.

From Blind Spots to Clarity: Why Observability Is Key

Gartner's primary warning against AI credential sharing is that it breaks fundamental security principles, including audit trails and nonrepudiation. When an AI agent uses a human's credentials, its actions are logged in our identity systems as if the human performed them, making it impossible to distinguish between legitimate user activity and an AI agent’s potentially malicious behavior. This blind spot makes incident investigations futile and Gartner estimates that by 2028, 90% of organizations who allow credential sharing will see a tripling of account takeovers and first-party fraud. 

AuthMind solves this major visibility gap with unmatched identity observability. The AuthMind platform provides comprehensive, real-time analysis of every identity-related activity and access path across your entire hybrid environment, from on-premises assets to SaaS platforms and cloud services.

Key capabilities include:

• Contextual Monitoring of every Agentic AI and their Access Activity: AuthMind provides the context needed to truly understand and secure all identities. Whether the identity is used as extension for a user’s activity, autonomous or as an asset being accessed by other agents. In addition, AuthMind maps the relationship between these identities allowing you to map agentic and non-human identities back to the user that owns them.

• Differentiating Humans from Agentic AI and Non-Human Identities: Even if an AI agent uses shared credentials, the AuthMind platform can identify indicators of unauthorized or suspicious activity. Addressing this critical risk that Gartner highlights.

  
  

With AuthMind, you can restore the integrity of your audit trails and ensure that every access and activity across your environment, whether performed by a human or an AI, is visible with the full context as to how it happened.

Strengthening Your Defenses with Proactive Posture Management

The secure alternative to credential sharing is access delegation. Gartner recommends that organizations implement secure access delegation capabilities, which allow a human to grant specific, limited permissions to an AI agent without sharing credentials. This requires a strong and continuously maintained identity security posture.

AuthMind's Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) capabilities enable organizations to build and maintain this strong defensive posture and assure secure access delegation. The AuthMind platform enables continuous identity hygiene maintenance by detecting and helping you clean up infrastructure issues before attackers can leverage them.

With AuthMind, you can proactively:

• Discover Infrastructure Risks: Identify MFA gaps, excessive privileges, credential risks, and risky configurations that could be exploited by a rogue or compromised AI agent.

• Eliminate Blind Spots: Uncover unknown agentic AIs, shadow assets, unauthorized local accounts, and other hidden access paths that exist outside of your managed IAM controls, ensuring your delegation policies can be enforced everywhere.
  

By improving your overall identity hygiene, AuthMind helps you build the robust foundation needed to implement the secure delegation frameworks Gartner recommends.

Real-Time Detection and Response for a New Class of Threat

Even with a strong posture, you need the ability to detect and respond to identity-based threats in real time. Gartner warns that allowing credential sharing will cause a surge in security incidents. An AI agent with compromised credentials can move laterally, escalate privileges, and bypass security controls with machine speed.

AuthMind's Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) capabilities detect sophisticated living off the land attacks and provide an unparalleled defense against these modern threats. Our platform monitors for risky identity activity in real-time and provides automated responses to contain threats before they can escalate.

AuthMind's ITDR capabilities allow you to:

• Detect Risky Activity: Flag suspicious patterns like privilege escalation, security control bypasses, and unusual agentic AI and NHI behavior that indicate a compromised agent.

• Automated Containment: Detect real time sophisticated identity infrastructure attacks, with full context for real-time automated remediation. 

AuthMind: Enabling Secure AI Innovation

Gartner's research makes it clear, organizations must find a secure way to manage the access and activity of their AI agents, and credential sharing is not the answer. AuthMind provides the only solution that combines the comprehensive visibility, proactive posture management, and real-time threat detection required to solve this complex challenge. By partnering with AuthMind, you can confidently embrace the productivity gains of AI and enable your organization to move faster without introducing unacceptable identity-related security risks.