Key Takeaways from the 2025 Gartner IAM Summit: Identity Will Lead the Next Era of Enterprise Innovation

This week in Grapevine, Texas, the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit brought together industry leaders, practitioners, and innovators to explore the current and future state of identity and access management. As always, the conversations were captivating but this year, they were also a call to action for IAM leaders. IAM is no longer simply an infrastructure function to enable and provision access. It is rapidly becoming the operational backbone for business innovation, risk governance, and responsible AI adoption.

From the keynote through the final day’s sessions, three themes stood out that every Identity Leader and CISO should take action on.

1. IAM projects Must Demonstrate Significant Security and Business Value

Across the agenda, particularly in the keynote and several sessions during the closing day, Gartner analysts underscored a pivotal shift: identity leaders must now quantify their impact in business terms.

Historically, IAM justification hinged on tool adoption, infrastructure,  policy governance, and human or NHI access rights. While still essential, these arguments alone are no longer enough to secure the budget, talent, and strategic influence identity teams need. Boards want measurable outcomes tied to business performance, such as:

• Proven risk reduction, compliance, and operational efficiency. 

• Building an Identity first security posture

• Faster enablement of digital business initiatives such as accelerating AI adoption

• Reduction in operational friction across users, partners, and workloads

• Increased agility in delivering new applications and services

• Direct linkage between IAM investments and strategic KPIs

The message was clear: to secure resources, IAM leaders must speak the language of the board and value creation. Identity programs that can articulate their impact on risk reduction, revenue acceleration, customer experience, productivity, and innovation will rise in strategic relevance.

But doing so requires visibility, intelligence, and metrics that many organizations still lack, setting the stage for the third major takeaway below.

2. IAM is a core enabler for AI adoption 

Another dominant theme was the explosion of AI initiatives across enterprises. Sessions highlighted two parallel realities:

AI for IAM

IAM teams are rapidly adopting AI for:

• Data analysis and trends

• Access modeling for authorization rules and least privilege

• ATO mitigation

• Posture issues identification and analysis

• Rapid report generation 

  
  

The opportunity is enormous: AI will allow identity organizations to reduce significant manual efforts by automating redundant tasks and help transition from reactive control to predictive intelligence and autonomous operations.

IAM securing AI

At the same time, AI is introducing new identity challenges:

• How do we authenticate and authorize AI agents?

• How do we monitor agent sprawl, access and activities? 

• How do we properly link AI agents back to their human maintainers? 

• How do we detect unauthorized usage of generative AI tools in the organization

• How do we prevent identity misuse within internal generative AI tools?

  
  

Identity is becoming the control plane for safe and accelerated AI adoption. Without a strong IAM foundation, AI projects can stall or create significant security risks in an organization. That’s why visibility and intelligence across all identity interactions is becoming non-negotiable prerequisites for enterprise AI maturity.

3. The Rise of Identity Visibility & Intelligence (IVIP): A New Market Category

Perhaps the most important development for the future of IAM is the emergence of the Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP) or Identity Observability category. Gartner emphasized that identity teams can no longer rely on isolated insights from individual IAM tools including PAM, IGA, hygiene, access management, ITDR, NHI, and others. To achieve robust ISPM, ITDR, PA and MFA governance and many other IAM tasks, organizations must adopt a deep IVIP solution.

Gartner states, “Identity visibility and intelligence platforms (IVIP) are products that provide rapid integration and visibility for identity and access management (IAM) relevant data, typically paired with advanced analytics (often AI-enabled) capabilities. This innovation provides a single view of IAM data, activity/events, relationships, configuration and posture to enable rapid improvement of all other integrated IAM controls and capabilities supporting both improved security and business enablement.”

Siloed visibility is no longer acceptable.

Enterprises need a unified understanding of how identities actually behave across the entire ecosystem, not just within individual IAM disciplines.

IVIP platforms fill this gap by delivering:

• End-to-end visibility across every identity, asset, and connection

• Continuous intelligence to contextualize risk and trust

• Cross-tool correlation to identify gaps, drift, misconfigurations, and exposures

• Operational insights that unlock automation and smarter decisions

  
  

This category is accelerating as it directly enables not only Takeaways #1 and #2, but dramatically up levels the entire IAM landscape by providing intelligence to make better decisions, reduce tools, and increase ROI. 

In short: IVIP is becoming the missing layer that turns identity from a fragmented set of tools into a strategic, intelligence-driven function capable of supporting modern business and AI innovation.

Conclusion: Identity Is No Longer a Back Office Function, It’s a Business Enabler

The 2025 Gartner IAM Summit made one message unmistakable: the future belongs to organizations that treat identity as a strategic discipline.

Those that can quantify operational risk reduction, business value, adopt AI responsibly, and gain intelligence across their entire identity infrastructure will accelerate innovation while reducing risk.

With the emergence of IVIP, IAM teams finally have the observability and intelligence they need to lead this transformation.