Identity has become the control plane of modern infrastructure, yet most identity governance systems were not designed for the scale and speed organizations now require. As AI agents begin operating alongside humans, access requests will increase dramatically and traditional workflows will not be able to keep up.

In this session, we’ll present findings from Opal’s State of Identity Governance & Access 2026 report, analyzing more than 500,000 real access requests across modern engineering organizations. The data reveals a major shift in how leading security teams manage access. Over 53% of requests are auto-approved, enabling faster provisioning, yet 44% of granted access goes unused for more than three months, quietly expanding the attack surface.

We’ll explore why legacy IGA approaches created significant operational overhead and how some organizations could face hundreds of thousands of manual access reviews per year just to keep up. We’ll also examine how modern teams are redesigning identity systems around a new philosophy: grant fast, revoke automatically, and review by exception.

Attendees will learn how forward-looking organizations are embedding identity into their infrastructure to support both human users and AI agents while reducing risk from dormant access and manual processes.