The Future of Cybersecurity Includes Non-Human Employees

Non-human identities are described as a growing feature of modern organisations, with NHIs including bots, AI agents, service accounts and automation scripts as enterprises scale AI and cloud automation. A 51% majority of respondents to ConductorOne’s 2025 Future of Identity Security Report said the security of NHIs is now as important as that of human accounts, and NHIs often operate outside traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems.

The article warns that NHIs can create new attack surfaces due to over‑permissioned standing access, static credentials and a lack of visibility, logging or monitoring, with cloud environments where NHIs outnumber human users expanding these risks. To mitigate this, it advocates applying zero‑trust principles, least‑privilege access, automated credential rotation and secrets management, including Just‑in‑Time access and ephemeral tokens to replace static credentials.

It also highlights the role of secrets management and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions such as KeeperPAM in securing both human and non-human identities at scale. according to Keeper Security.