"The IAM problem with agents is not that we lack the right credentials standard. It is that we built access control around principals that have accountability, and agents have none. Every control we designed assumes a principal with something to lose. Agents operate outside that contract entirely. The organizations getting ahead of this are mapping what they actually have, categorizing it honestly, and governing proportionally to what each category can do and what it can cost when it goes wrong.”
As 2026 ends, enterprises will realize their Identity and Access Management systems are failing because they were built for humans, not goal-directed AI agents. Standard workload identity models designed for service accounts simply do not work for these new entities.
Meanwhile, agent identity sprawl will continue to accelerate due to unmonitored procurement, unmanaged open-source deployments, and agents embedded within SaaS platforms. Organizations will need to urgently build agent authorization governance fit for purpose. Without it, the costly gap between an agent’s authorized capabilities and its actual actions will become a severe liability.
Fernando Montenegro serves as the Vice President & Practice Lead for Cybersecurity & Resilience at The Futurum Group. In this role, he leads the development and execution of the Cybersecurity research agenda, working closely with the team to drive the practice’s growth. His research focuses on addressing critical topics in modern cybersecurity. These include the multifaceted role of AI in cybersecurity, strategies for managing an ever-expanding attack surface, and the evolution of cybersecurity architectures toward more platform-oriented solutions.
Before joining The Futurum Group, Fernando held senior industry analyst roles at Omdia, S&P Global, and 451 Research. His career also includes diverse roles in customer support, security, IT operations, professional services, and sales engineering. He has worked with pioneering Internet Service Providers, established security vendors, and startups across North and South America.
Fernando holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and various industry certifications. Although he is originally from Brazil, he has been based in Toronto, Canada, for many years.
The vision behind everything in Futurum’s Custom Research practice is this: research should show you what is happening, what comes next, and what to do about it. It should be personal to each audience, easy for people to grasp, and structured so LLMs can reason over it accurately. And it should be fast and turnkey; you want answers now, not another project to carry for quarters.
Whether you are defining business, channel, or go-to-market strategy; evaluating vendors or justifying ROI; or commissioning research to fill an emerging market need, we have your back, with a program that answers your questions with the objectivity and credibility to drive real decisions.
To do it, we bring unmatched data to bear: Futurum research, surveys, and market projections; validated market feeds; ETR’s 15 years of insight from 10,000 technology decision-makers; G2’s buyer and user data; and what our analysts hear every day. Add leading primary collection, from AI-moderated voice interviews to surveys and analyst-led interviews, all turnkey, and every project comes out credible, nuanced, and actionable.
And we don’t just drop the results in your lap. For internal work, we provide analyst-led sessions, interactive dashboards, and a range of formats. For market-facing work, Futurum delivers turnkey activation and amplification that actually gets seen, by people and by LLMs, through our media and share of voice. This is research that moves decisions and markets.
We will meet you wherever you are, from a fast-turn brief to a multi-year program, and shape the work to your goals, timeline, and budget. The right program for your moment.
If any of this is useful, I would love to talk.
VP, Custom Research · The Futurum Group
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