JumpCloud Inc. has published a new research report, Enterprise AI Access Is Outpacing Control, revealing a growing gap between AI adoption and security oversight within organizations. The findings indicate that businesses are rapidly granting AI agents the ability to modify systems, manage permissions, and access files, often without implementing equivalent governance measures. While more than half of surveyed organizations now rely on AI agents with operational control capabilities, 59% of those using such agents reported that these tools are not subject to the same security and compliance standards applied to human users.
The study of 250 IT leaders across the U.S. and U.K. shows how organizations are managing AI as it gains greater access across the enterprise. The research also found differences in AI auditability across workplace software platforms: just 11% of Google Workspace-primary organizations fall into the lowest auditability tier, compared with 21% of Microsoft 365-primary organizations.
The findings reveal significant gaps in how organizations govern AI access and activity:
- The Identity Gap: Among organizations using AI agents, only 41% have fully integrated agents into the same IAM policies used for human users, leaving 59% without full integration.
- The Proof Gap: 72% of organizations report a considerable gap between what AI is allowed to access and what they can prove it actually accessed.
- AI-Related Incidents: 92% of organizations report experiencing at least one AI-related incident or exposure in the past 12 months. More than one-third (36%) investigated an AI-related concern but were unable to determine what the AI had accessed.
“AI agents are quickly becoming another class of identity in the enterprise. They can access sensitive systems, change records, trigger workflows, and act on behalf of people, but many organizations still aren’t governing them with the same rigor they apply to human users. Every agent needs clear ownership, appropriate access, and controls that follow it throughout its lifecycle. As agents become more autonomous, that foundation is what allows organizations to scale AI without losing accountability.”
-Joel Rennich, senior vice president of advanced technologies & innovation, JumpCloud
To solve this challenge, the report details the Agentic IAM Lifecycle framework. This guide helps IT teams discover, register, manage, and govern AI agents alongside human employees. By applying identity rules to AI tools, companies can assign owners, set permissions, and track AI actions start to finish.
JumpCloud delivers an AI-driven unified IT management platform built to protect and support today’s digital workforce. By bringing together identity, device, and access management in a single solution, the company enables secure and intelligent IT operations that extend from employees to autonomous AI agents. JumpCloud helps organizations worldwide reduce complexity, strengthen security, and transform AI-related challenges into strategic opportunities, ensuring authorized users and agents can securely access the resources they need.
