Agentic Identity and Access Management is the practice of giving each AI agent its own auditable identity, rather than letting it act as an anonymous helper or share human credentials. The agent gets narrowly scoped permissions, such as access to one API, one dataset, or one workflow step, and those permissions can be time-limited, logged, and revoked.
This matters because AI agents can execute actions directly in real systems: they can send requests, read records, trigger jobs, or reach external services. If their access is too broad, a mistake, prompt injection, or environment misconfiguration can turn into real damage. In defense, agentic IAM supports least privilege, clear accountability, and faster containment. In attacks, stolen or overpowered agent tokens can be abused to move through cloud apps, automation tools, and public services at machine speed. Strong agentic IAM reduces the reachability gap by making every action traceable and every permission deliberate.