Ai Agents Set To Reshape 2026 Workflows Execs Warn Identity Security

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 27, 2025, 8:29 PM

ai agents set to reshape 2026 workflows execs warn identity security

Executives across software, cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure say autonomous AI agents will move into core workflows next year, but warn that governance, identity controls and vendor lock-in risks will shape who can scale safely. Big companies and fast-growing firms in India and Asia-Pacific are heading into 2026 betting that autonomous AI agents will move from pilots into core operations, while warning that identity controls, open infrastructure and governance... Agentic AI is already shifting from novelty to workload engine, with firms automating routine business tasks and beginning to rewire how software is built, they said. Vivek Ganesh, regional vice president, OutSystems India, said the discussion was moving ‘from experimentation to execution’ as organisations look for measurable impact rather than ‘proofs of concept’, adding that AI is evolving from general-purpose... For software developers, the shift is expected to be deeper than faster code writing. Rajeev Ranjan, Atlassian’s chief technology officer, said AI would become embedded across an AI-native software development lifecycle, from planning and design to code review, production and incident response.

Home | Updates | AI agents set to reshape work in 2026 Efficiency and workforce readiness are highlighted in Google Cloud’s 2026 report as companies integrate AI agents into core business processes. Google Cloud’s 2026 AI Agent Trends Report shows AI agents are moving from experimental tools to central business systems. Employees are shifting from routine execution to oversight and strategic decision-making. The report highlights agents managing end-to-end workflows across teams, thereby improving efficiency and streamlining complex processes. Personalised customer service is becoming faster and more accurate thanks to these systems.

Security operations are seeing benefits as AI agents handle alerts, investigations and fraud detection more effectively. Human analysts can now focus on higher-value tasks while routine work is automated. Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive. The identity landscape is changing faster than most security teams can adapt. Over the past year, organizations have raced to understand how AI fits into their environments - experimenting with copilots, automations, and conversational interfaces.

But 2026 will be the year this shifts from experimentation to expectation. AI isn't just a new feature in the stack; it's now a fundamental force reshaping how identities are created, governed, and secured. The organizations that thrive will be those willing to rethink long-held assumptions and modernize the foundations of identity itself. Below are the four trends that will shape identity, security, and access management more than any others in the year ahead. Until now, AI has largely been treated as a helpful new tool. In 2026, it must be treated as a new identity.

The surge of AI agents, automated workflows, and non-human identities has created an attack surface that no traditional, rules-based system can realistically govern. Static policies simply can't keep pace with machine-speed activity. The next frontier is autonomous, AI-native identity defense - systems that monitor patterns, detect deviations, and respond to threats without waiting for human intervention. "Fighting AI with AI" will shift from slogan to standard as organizations deploy adaptive defenses capable of countering AI-driven attacks in real time. 2026 marks the tipping point where AI agents will significantly outnumber humans in the enterprise and hold exponentially more permissions. With AI agents now making decisions, triggering workflows, touching sensitive data and initiating transactions, the identity attack surface is fundamentally changing.

Token Security co-founders Itamar Apelblat and Ido Shlomo share ten predictions that define how AI-driven identity risk, governance and security will evolve in the year ahead. “Today, most AI Agents are still running in a non-production environment. We've already seen organizations converting workloads to interact with AI, and also connecting their AI Agents into the production environment. To do that on a large scale, they have to manage their permissions and life cycle.” “Traditional compliance models were built for human-centric workflows, and they’re already breaking under the realities of AI-driven operations. Over the next year, we’ll see frameworks evolve dramatically to recognize AI agents as active members of the workforce with their own identities, permissions, accountability requirements and control expectations.

Any organization that doesn’t update its compliance posture to reflect this shift will find itself out of alignment with regulators and customers alike.” “In 2026, AI agents will significantly outnumber human users in most large organizations and they’ll hold more sensitive permissions. The most severe identity incidents won’t originate from a compromised employee, but from an over-privileged or compromised agent capable of making thousands of harmful decisions per minute.” 2026 marks the tipping point when artificial intelligence begins to fundamentally reshape cyber risk. After several years of widespread adoption, AI moves beyond influencing how we work and starts transforming the enterprise itself. AI is now embedded at every layer of the organization, from workflows and applications to customer experience, DevOps, IT automation, and strategic decision, making.

Yet governance, security controls, and identity protections have not kept pace. The result is growing blind spots, rapidly expanding attack surfaces, and a widening speed gap between defenders and increasingly automated adversaries. Delinea leaders predict that 2026 will force a new identity security playbook, one built for a world where AI systems, machine identities, and autonomous agents outnumber humans, operate at machine speed, and increasingly make... Below are the top five identity-driven shifts Delinea’s leadership team sees reshaping enterprise security in the year ahead. As AI systems, agents, and machine identities begin acting autonomously, making decisions, and accessing sensitive data at machine speed, traditional security models will break under the strain. Our Google Cloud 2026 AI Agent Trends Report forecasts 2026 will be the year AI agents fundamentally reshape business.

Google Cloud's 2026 AI Agent Trends Report says AI agents will boost productivity and automate complex tasks. Expect agents to enhance customer experiences and strengthen security operations. Companies should focus on training employees to work alongside AI for best results. Your browser does not support the audio element. AI agents can now understand a goal, semi-autonomously develop a multi-step plan, and take actions on your behalf — all under your expert guidance and oversight. We’re moving away from abstract, future-gazing possibilities, and focusing on delivering tangible business value right now.

Today, Google Cloud dropped its 2026 AI Agent Trends Report, along with a companion NotebookLM. Here’s a look at the five key trends that are defining where agents will fundamentally reshape business and drive new value in the coming year. In 2023, chatbots answered questions. By 2025, AI agents can code and design entire applications and services from scratch, as well as do deep, nearly scientific-grade research on any topic. Now, as enterprises deploy armies of autonomous agents, a critical question emerges: How do we prevent these powerful tools from descending into chaos in the coming years? We at Trevolution chose not to restrain our ambition but redesign it instead.

Our own journey in developing AI in 2023 had a rocky start: We were building and testing a chatbot, Olivia, for customer support. It could answer simple questions — think along the lines of early ChatGPT functionality; nothing but a chatbot. It sounded good in theory; however, our market analysis indicated that the real-world application would have limited utility. Our analysis revealed that customers in travel don’t contact support to chat — they require specific actions to be performed. Industry experience had shown that customers typically expect support systems to handle actionable requests: rebooking flights, fixing reservations and processing ticket refund inquiries. However, Olivia functioned solely as a conversational chatbot and lacked the capability to execute these operational tasks, which can only be performed by trained customer service agents with appropriate system access.

Following this assessment, we decided to reorient our approach, focusing on internal AI applications: testing how Olivia could assist employees rather than customers. This approach also offered reduced complexity, more structured feedback mechanisms and a controlled operational scope. By late 2023, Olivia had been developed as an AI assistant with clearly defined responsibilities and demonstrated consistent performance in controlled testing environments according to established metrics, though we knew it was capable of... Then came the industry switch, which followed two key events: OpenAI announcing agentic AI as a core direction in March this year (having previously released Swarm in October 2024). And Model Context Protocol (MCP) being released by Anthropic back in November 2024 to minimal initial fanfare — now transformed into the de facto industry standard. AI Agents weren’t science fiction anymore.

Suddenly, they became reality, so we started developing an agentic platform immediately. Not just human-to-agent interaction. Agent-to-agent communication using Google’s A2A protocol. The goal? A specialized team where each AI agent does one thing perfectly and, together, they handle complex workflows. Imagine a workforce where one agent summarizes meetings.

Another books flights. A third analyzes customer calls. All working in unison. AI agents have moved quickly from experimentation to real-world deployment. Over the past year, organizations have gone from asking whether agents work to figuring out how to deploy enterprise AI agents reliably at scale. The 2026 State of AI Agents Report from the Claude team captures this shift clearly.

Drawing on insights from teams building with modern LLM agents—including those powered by models from providers like Anthropic—the report offers a grounded view of how agentic systems are being adopted today and what’s coming... Below are five of the most important takeaways from the report. One of the clearest signals from the report is that agent adoption is no longer limited by model capability—whether teams are using models from Anthropic, OpenAI, or others. Why this matters: Modern AI agents are expected to operate across real enterprise systems—CRMs, ticketing tools, internal APIs, and data platforms. As a result, the hardest part of deploying agentic workflows today is not intelligence, but secure and reliable access to production systems.

Ai Agents Set To Reshape 2026 Workflows Execs Warn Identity Security

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