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The AI Revolution is Here, and Your Security Playbook Is Outdated

The AI revolution is changing everything, but traditional security playbooks aren't keeping up. Discover the new security risks AI agents introduce and how identity is the key to a secure and scalable AI future.

Michelle Agroskin

Product Marketing Manager, Customer Identity Cloud

Jul 21, 2025 • 4 min read

AI is already changing the rules. It’s pushing teams to rethink what they build, how they secure it, and what users expect from every interaction. Companies are in an all-out race to deploy AI agents that can automate workflows, personalize experiences, make decisions, act on behalf of users, and create value. In fact, by 2028, Gartner predicts that 33% of enterprise software applications will include Agentic AI (up from less than 1% in 2024), with at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions being made autonomously through AI agents (Gartner, 2025).

The pressure to ship AI features is high and it’s critical for staying competitive in this new world. But as we rush to build, security is being left behind. The security patterns we relied on for decades were not designed for a world where non-human agents act autonomously. It’s not just a new challenge. It’s a new kind of risk that can’t be solved with old playbooks.

The Developer’s Dilemma: Building in a World Without Rules

If you're a developer or technical leader, you're on the front lines of this shift, facing a new set of problems that have no easy answers:

  • The "who" problem: When an AI agent makes a request via an API, how do you know it's acting on behalf of a legitimate user and not a compromised system or a malicious actor? How do you prove the user’s identity behind this agent?
  • The "permission" problem: What should an AI agent be allowed to do? Granting it broad static permissions is a massive security risk. But managing granular context-aware permissions for thousands of autonomous agents is a nightmare.
  • The "attack surface" problem: New attack vectors, like prompt injection and persona-switching, are emerging daily. Developers are now expected to be experts in a security field that is literally being invented in real-time.

These aren’t just harder problems to solve; they’re new problems. The systems and playbooks that we’ve traditionally relied on won’t work, AI requires thinking about security in a new way.

AI Security Starts With Identity

Building and deploying AI agents in a more secure manner starts with getting identity right.

Just as you wouldn’t let an unknown human user access your systems, why would an unknown AI agent be any different? The only way to build a more secure, scalable, and trustworthy AI is to treat every single agent as a first-class identity.

Here's how identity solves the “developer's dilemma”:

  1. Identity solves "who": By understanding the user behind each agent, you can confidently authenticate every request.
  2. Identity solves "permission": Once the user’s identity behind the agent is known, you can apply granular authorization policies. The agent inherits the permissions of the user it's acting for, for that specific task—no more, no less. This dramatically contains the "blast radius" if it's ever compromised.
  3. Identity minimizes the "attack surface": Ensuring your AI agents are known and bound by the principles of least privilege makes the growing attack surface, a contained one.

Don't Build a Problem; Deploy a Solution

The urgency of the AI industry shift means you don't have time to become an identity infrastructure expert or build a complex security platform from scratch. And you shouldn’t have to. The risk of getting it wrong is too high, and the distraction from your core product is too great.

At Auth0 by Okta, we've spent years perfecting the solution for managing the world's most complex identity use cases. We are extending that same platform that is more secure, reliable, and scalable to solve the identity challenge for AI. With Auth0, you can:

  • Help ensure smooth, more secure user authentication for AI agents.
  • Use Token Vault to help ensure your AI agents are making more secure API calls using MCP or traditional methods.
  • Enforce Fine-Grained Authorization to easily manage what your agents can and cannot do based on clear, centralized policies.
  • Use Client-Initiated Backchannel Authentication to allow AI agents to take actions on behalf of users while still keeping humans-in-the-loop.

If identity isn’t built right from the start, it becomes a liability. With Auth0, you can ship faster, stay more secure, and focus on what you’re actually building. Learn more today.