Five Identity-Driven Shifts Reshaping Enterprise Security In 2026
Help Net Security, December 11,2025
2026 marks the tipping point when artificial intelligence begins to fundamentally reshape cyber risk. After several years of widespread adoption, AI moves beyond influencing how we work and starts transforming the enterprise itself.
AI is now embedded at every layer of the organization, from workflows and applications to customer experience, DevOps, IT automation, and strategic decision, making. Yet governance, security controls, and identity protections have not kept pace. The result is growing blind spots, rapidly expanding attack surfaces, and a widening speed gap between defenders and increasingly automated adversaries.
Delinea leaders predict that 2026 will force a new identity security playbook, one built for a world where AI systems, machine identities, and autonomous agents outnumber humans, operate at machine speed, and increasingly make decisions beyond direct human oversight.