Privileged Access Management Is Becoming the Real-Time Control Plane for AI Agents
Traditional Privileged Access Management was built around a simple premise: human users need elevated access sometimes, so we vault those credentials, require checkout, and log who used what when. It works reasonably well for humans, who operate on human timescales, request access explicitly, and can be held accountable by name. AI agents operate differently. They access dozens of systems in parallel, at machine speed, for tasks that were authorized in general but not pre-approved in each specific instance. The traditional PAM model — vault credentials, check them out, check them back in — doesn’t map cleanly onto an agent that makes 200 API calls in thirty seconds across five different systems. ...