Understand the key risks of agentic AI, and the core pieces to secure it at scale.
According to Gartner® analysts in their new research report How to Secure Enterprise Agentic AI Ambition, rapid adoption of agentic AI is outpacing the ability of enterprises to effectively secure it. Key agentic AI security challenges include:
Adoption and development of AI tools without central oversight, creating shadow attack surfaces.
AI agents themselves introduce new risks, such as AI automation hijacking and prompt injection.
Vulnerabilities within AI agents that are embedded in applications.
A single AI agent often requires multiple accounts—with rights inherited from multiple human owners—making access control and oversight difficult.
Cybersecurity teams lack mature toolsets to secure agentic AI.
So, how do CIOs and CISOs accelerate enterprise agentic AI initiatives, without introducing unacceptable security risks?
“Identity and access management leaders must work with other teams to uniquely identify each AI agent and enforce least privilege by modeling the access each agent needs to do its job.”
—Gartner Research. How to Secure Enterprise Agentic AI Ambition. By Jeremy D'Hoinne, Dionisio Zumerle. Jan. 2026
Key agentic AI attack surfaces.
A detailed analysis of 5 core workstreams to mature agentic AI security in the enterprise, including key processes and controls to implement.
How to categorize and classify AI agents for effective risk prioritization.
The foundations for a strong AI agent identity and access management implementation (from discovery, to least privilege, just-in-time access, and more).
Expected security outcomes and success measures.
Access the report now.
Gartner is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.