Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Every year, security and tech leaders come to the RSA conference in San Francisco to take the industry’s pulse, and every RSAC tends to be dominated by a single, overarching theme. Last year, the theme was: “AI agents are coming, and governance isn’t ready.” And sure enough, the theme of RSAC 2026 was: “AI agents are here, and governance needs to catch up.”

If 2025 was the year of AI adoption, 2026 is when AI evolves from a software story to a people story. Katya Laviolette, our Chief People Officer, explored this idea in a recent Forbes article about how 1Password’s internal network of AI Champions is shaping this evolution and helping us set the standard for how we use AI to drive impact across 1Password.

We built 1Password Unified Access to extend identity security beyond humans to the agents and machine workloads operating across your business. In practice, that means securing not just who gets access, but how agentic systems connect to tools, services, and data.

Automating user provisioning sounds simple, until you remember everything that provisioning really touches.

Modern enterprises aren’t just adding employees; they’re adding subsidiaries, multiple teams, contractors, AI builders, temporary projects, and new SaaS tools every week.

SaaS contract renewals have a way of sneaking up on IT and Finance teams. One day, everything is running fine. The next, a renewal notice hits your inbox, usually with little context, limited time, and no clear answer to the most important questions: Who’s using this? Do we still need it? And are we paying for more than we should?

AI and automation are embedded in daily work. Copilots draft content and pull in customer context. Agents triage tickets, update records, and trigger workflows across Slack, Salesforce, Jira, and GitHub. In engineering, this acceleration shows up in scripts, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation that depend on secrets to ship and operate software.

Lean teams are under constant pressure to move faster: more SaaS, more automations, and more AI woven into daily work. People sign in more often, across more apps, on more devices, and they’re rewarded for speed, not caution.

There’s a moment every IT and security team recognises. You’ve done the hard work: rolled out SSO, tightened access policies, and moved sensitive tools behind stronger authentication. On paper, it looks like progress.

For security and IT professionals, the past decade has brought a series of tectonic shifts that have toppled old assumptions and created new opportunities. First, the SaaS revolution destroyed the paradigm of an IT-governed corporate network. Next, COVID-19 forever altered how and where work gets done. Then, the biggest shockwave of them all arrived: AI-based tools that are rewriting the very definition of “identity.”