The Future of Identity
How people interact with brands online has been upended due to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), new fraud threats, and skyrocketing consumer expectations. It's become increasingly difficult for organizations to distinguish bad actors from legitimate users, and at the same time, people globally are losing confidence in organizations to protect their data.
Trust is eroding, and identity has become the foundation of security, experience, and verification.
Looking ahead to 2026, we've worked with Deloitte to come up with our top six trends on where identity and access management (IAM) is heading, and how organizations can future ready their identity strategies to build and maintain trust in today's "trust nothing" era.
Trend 1: Managing AI Agents
AI Agents Will Break Outdated IAM
Agentic AI has evolved from experimentation to enterprise integration. Autonomous software entities now handle complex decision-making, execute workflows, and interact with APIs and applications on behalf of users and systems. From digital workers and API-driven assistants to Computer Using Agents (CUAs), these agents are driving measurable productivity and automation gains across industries.
The challenge ahead centers on trust, specifically, how organizations securely distinguish, authenticate, authorize, and govern these agents without resorting to brittle credential sharing or ineffective bot detection. Traditional IAM frameworks are buckling under the scale and unpredictability of agent behavior, pushing enterprises toward AI-aware identity systems that support authenticated delegation, dynamic entitlements, and human-in-the-loop oversight.
This evolution will be essential as agentic commerce emerges—a paradigm where personal AI agents independently shop, decide, and transact on behalf of consumers across channels. Identity systems will need to adapt to recognize and verify agents, enforce delegated authority, and sustain trust throughout agent-driven transactions. The next frontier of identity management will likely be defined by how seamlessly organizations can manage trust between humans and autonomous entities.
Ping Perspective
Trend 2: Securing Helpdesks
Helpdesks Could Be the New Top Target
Organized criminal groups now use fraudulent hires, insider recruitment, and AI-generated deepfakes to infiltrate organizations. These are low-tech, high-impact tactics that exploit people and processes, not passwords or code.
The helpdesk is an ideal entry point for social-engineering attacks against enterprise identity systems. As defenses around multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), and perimeter controls strengthen, attackers are shifting toward the human layer, exploiting helpdesk agents through convincing social engineering, AI-generated voice deepfakes, and urgency-driven manipulation. Breaches across industries, from hospitality to finance, increasingly trace back to compromised support interactions where attackers tricked agents into resetting credentials or disabling MFA.
Several factors amplify this risk: outsourced or remote staff may lack personal familiarity with end users, performance metrics prioritize speed over verification, and the high-pressure nature of support work leaves agents vulnerable to manipulation. Training can't close this gap; automated verification can.
In response, helpdesks should evolve into identity-aware security hubs. Real-time risk assessment and mandatory verification before account or device recovery will become standard. The organizations that reimagine the helpdesk as a proactive trust checkpoint, rather than a reactive support function, will help close one of the most exploited gaps in enterprise identity.
Ping Perspective
Trend 3: Preventing Hiring Fraud
Hiring Fraud Will Continue to Be a Top Concern
AI has lowered the barrier to entry—anyone with bad intent and access to generative tools can fabricate convincing identities. The result: a surge in applicants using deepfakes to misrepresent themselves in your hiring process.
Bait-and-switch hiring, where the person who starts the job is not the one who interviewed, has become a prevalent tactic, often powered by AI-generated résumés, deepfake video interviews, and falsified credentials. These schemes thrive in large, fast-moving organizations that depend on remote and contract workforces, where traditional verification methods and static background checks fail to detect deception.
The underlying conditions are accelerating: the globalization of the workforce, compressed hiring cycles, and dependence on third-party platforms for sourcing and onboarding can weaken trust signals during recruitment. At the same time, adversaries are combining synthetic identities, fraudulent documentation, and compromised insiders to gain privileged access. This has created a new class of insider threat—one that passes surface-level checks and embeds itself before any anomalies appear.
Organizations that fail to evolve their hiring and verification practices could find their workforce perimeter increasingly porous and exploitable.
Ping Perspective
Trend 4: User Autonomy & Decentralized Identity
User Autonomy Will Accelerate Decentralized Identity Adoption
The enterprise-centric identity model—where user data is siloed, duplicated, and controlled internally—is collapsing under its own weight. Consumers now expect ownership of their personal data, and regulators are enforcing that expectation through frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA, and emerging AI governance standards. Movements like open banking are accelerating demands for data portability and interoperability across sectors. Yet, most organizations still operate with fragmented identity records scattered across applications, regions, and third-party platforms.
This lack of integration creates unnecessary friction, inflates risk, and complicates compliance. Legacy architectures have become single points of failure and high-value targets for attackers. At the same time, trust is eroding: outdated identity records persist across disconnected systems, and individuals lack transparency into how their data is stored, shared, or monetized.
As the balance of control shifts toward the individual, enterprises should embrace decentralized, consent-based identity ecosystems. These systems will empower users to manage and verify their data directly while allowing organizations to deliver secure, personalized experiences that comply with evolving global mandates. And as users delegate more tasks to AI agents, the same consent-driven principles will ensure those agents act only with verified intent.
Ping Perspective
Trend 5: Quantum Computing
Quantum Computing Shifts From Concept to Capability
Quantum computing is moving from theoretical to tangible, challenging organizations to confront vulnerabilities in the cryptographic foundations of their identity systems. Advances in quantum processors and algorithms are shortening the timeline for breaking conventional encryption methods, threatening the integrity of long-trusted public key infrastructures and digital certificates.
This same computing power will also amplify AI's capabilities, accelerating analysis, automation, and simulation far beyond current limits. Enterprises that harness it will gain unprecedented efficiency, but malicious actors will leverage it too, finding new ways to breach and exploit organizations lacking resilient identity architectures.
Even if large-scale quantum attacks remain years away, the data being protected today, especially identity records and authentication keys, must withstand future decryption. Forward-looking enterprises are beginning to adopt quantum-resistant cryptography, modernize signing mechanisms, and inventory legacy algorithms. The transition will be gradual but essential; those who start early can maintain trust when quantum computing crosses from lab environment to operational reality.
Ping Perspective
Trend 6: Verification & Zero Trust
Continuous Assurance Across Every Interaction
The strain on identity systems will likely intensify as enterprises expand across hybrid clouds, outsourced operations, and interconnected supply chains. The attack surface will grow, while long-standing weak points, like recovery workflows, onboarding processes, and access renewal, could be further undermined by AI-driven manipulation. With more users, vendors, and agents sharing systems and data, every assumed trust relationship may become a potential breach path.
Verified Trust is the journey from implicit to explicit to continuous trust—uniting identification, verification, authentication, and authorization in a single automated assurance loop. Verification can no longer function as a single checkpoint—it must evolve into a continuous control mechanism that validates every access request, credential reset, and privilege escalation with real-time assurance. The concept of verified trust will gain prominence as enterprises face tighter regulations, heightened audit expectations, and escalating costs from insider and social engineering attacks.
Organizations that operationalize verification, embedding it into workflows, automating enforcement, and measuring trust as a core performance metric will define the next stage of security maturity. In the years ahead, success will be measured by how confidently an enterprise can prove and manage who is accessing what, under what authority, and why.
Ping Perspective
Conclusion: It Starts & Ends With Identity
As new technologies, more sophisticated threats, and skyrocketing user experience expectations continue to fundamentally change how digital identities and access are managed, one thing remains the same: the organizations that can stay ahead of the trends have a significant opportunity to differentiate themselves in the market.
The ability to distinguish between legitimate users and bad actors and managing AI agents, while delivering seamless experiences, will set organizations up for success in 2026 and well into the future.
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2Mordor Intelligence, Agentic AI Market Size and Share
3World Economic Forum, How AI-driven fraud challenges the global economy – and ways to combat it
5CoinLaw, Open Banking Adoption Statistics 2025: Adoption, Innovation & Growth
6SpinQ, The Surprising Global Footprint of Quantum Computers in 2025
7CrowdStrike, Zero Trust Security Explained: Principles of the Zero Trust Model