Cisco Bets on Identity as Control Plane for AI

News, news analysis, and commentary on the latest trends in cybersecurity technology.

Cisco joins a growing list of security platform providers who are betting that securing the agentic workforce means turning identity into the primary control plane.

June 26, 2026

As enterprises deploy AI agents at a rapid pace, they face a previously unconsidered issue: these agents — including API keys, service accounts, OAuth applications and other non-human identities (NHIs) — now have human‑level privileges but are not managed the same way.

This is a growing problem. In a recent Deloitte survey of over 3,000 business and IT leaders, about a quarter of respondents said their companies are using agentic AI in some form. This figure is expected to surge to 74% over the next two years. These agents and their NHIs largely sit outside conventional identity and access management (IAM) and security operations center (SOC) infrastructure, meaning the company has no visibility or control over them.