Why Identity Security’s Next Frontier Is Governing Chains, Not Identities

InnovationWhy Identity Security’s Next Frontier Is Governing Chains, Not IdentitiesByJohn Pritchard,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 06:45am EDTDr. John Pritchard is the Chief Executive Officer at Radiant Logic, responsible for the company’s global product vision. getty​Somewhere in your enterprise right now, a sales rep is building an AI agent. They are using a low-code platform—Microsoft Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce, ServiceNow—that’s already authorized in your environment. The agent inherits their permissions. It spawns service principals, OAuth grants and API connections to do its work. Three weeks from now, that rep gets recruited to a competitor. HR processes the departure. IT disables the SSO. The access review closes clean—for every system it knows about.But the agent is still running, the credentials it created are still valid and no tool in your stack can trace those credentials back to a human who no longer works for you.This is the operating reality of every Fortune-scale environment with which I work, and it is the problem traditional identity controls cannot solve.What I Mean By 'Agent'​​Let’s be precise. When I say agent, I do not mean a chatbot, a Copilot suggestion, or an LLM with a system prompt. I mean an AI-driven process, created inside an enterprise platform, that acts autonomously using real enterprise credentials. It moves data, calls APIs and makes decisions without human-in-the-loop approval. It operates under its creator’s identity and access entitlements, frequently inheriting the full set.This is qualitatively different from any prior class of identity. Service accounts are static. API keys are scoped. Agents are autonomous, persistent and inherited.The Inheritance Chain​​For two decades, identity controls were designed for one type: humans. We...