Let’s face it, AI is everywhere now. It has moved from novelty to necessity, reshaping the way we work, make decisions and secure our organizations. It guides how we plan trips, shop for essentials and discover information – but one of its most profound impacts is happening across enterprise environments.
The growing role of AI in IAM
In identity security (also known as identity and access management (IAM)), AI is redefining what a “good” IAM strategy even looks like. It streamlines operations, simplifying decision-making and freeing security teams from the constant grind of manual triage.
The quiet engine of predictive AI
A modern identity program increasingly relies on predictive intelligence and analytics – the kind that runs in the background to sharpen control and reduce risk. It elevates key identity security capabilities such as:
- Behavioral analytics to evaluate access decisions in real time and recognize outliers and subtle anomalies long before they escalate
- Risk-informed authentication that continuously adjusts based on context and emerging behavior patterns
- Intelligent identity lifecycle automation that aligns privileges to roles and business units with far greater precision
- Privileged access and advanced role discovery that identifies risk possibilities as well as natural groupings of access, and refines them into cleaner, more sustainable structures
Maturity is more than just filling gaps
As IAM matures, closing security gaps through automation is only the beginning. The real gain comes from sustained optimization and integration of security tools. We expect to see more use of predictive models to examine entitlement changes, monitor privileged activity and keep pace with the constant movement of people, non-human identities and processes.
This use of predictive models helps ensure that users receive exactly the access they need, no more and no less, and that deviations in privileged use are surfaced quickly.
Why an identity fabric is key to this approach
When these insights feed into an identity fabric, everything becomes more connected and powerful. For example, predictive identity security with AI can analyze massive log volumes and behavioral trends to identify the conditions under which anomalies may arise in the future. This type of foresight gives organizations the ability to prepare and strengthen their posture long before a threat materializes.
Generative AI then adds a different dimension. It learns from reports, patterns and operational history to propose entirely new approaches to identity strategy. It can translate intent into secure access policies written in natural language. It can build workflows, produce recommendations and connect structured data sets to create a more coherent view of risk and governance.
Unification is key
All of this becomes even more powerful when it is applied within a unified, integrated identity fabric.
Today’s environments are defined by a dramatic expansion of non-human identities, distributed workforces and cloud-first architectures. These forces create complexity and widen the attack surface, especially when AI solutions are deployed in isolation. A cohesive identity fabric allows these capabilities to reinforce one another. It closes gaps of siloes in tools that often remain hidden. It drives efficiency, accelerates governance and helps teams operate with confidence.
Because AI is everywhere and its benefits abound, the question is no longer whether AI belongs in identity. The real question is whether you have the right platform to put it to work in a way that is responsible, reliable and aligned to your strategy.
Download the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for PAM and learn more
Hear about these learnings and more from One Identity VP of Strategy, Larry Chinski, at the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit in Grapevine, Texas on Tuesday, December 9 at 11:15 a.m. in room D3 for his session, Think AI will solve your IAM challenges? Think again.
