Machine identities now outnumber human ones by more than 80 to 1 at a typical enterprise, according to CyberArk's 2026 research. KPMG's 2026 cybersecurity report puts non-human identities near the top of the CISO worry list for the year. Every AI agent you deploy adds more of them. The problem is not just identity count, it is credentials. To do their work, agents need access credentials, and once they have them, they can keep them. NuDay removes the credential from the equation. With scoped, ephemeral credentials passed real-time to the tool that needs them, not to the agent itself, NuDay's zero-credential, on-behalf-of execution allows access without ever handing the agent a standing secret.
Sophos, surveying 5,000 IT and security professionals for its State of Identity Security 2026 report, found that weak management of non-human identities is now the second-largest root cause of breaches, behind only human error and showing up in roughly 40% of successful attacks. Only about a third of organizations regularly audit or rotate their service accounts. SANS found much the same: 76% of organizations report their non-human identities are growing, 74% are already running AI agents that need credentials, and 92% will not rotate machine credentials on a 90-day cycle because they are afraid it could break something in production.
Nine in ten security teams know the credential should be rotated and choose not to, because a rotated key means a service might break. You kind of can't blame them. It is a rational response to a bad architecture. When an agent holds (and expects) a standing credential, rotating it is dangerous for production, and not rotating it is dangerous for security. So teams tend to pick the danger that breaks fewer things less often and leave those credentials in place.
Most of the market is proposing and building the opposite of what we're doing at NuDay. The prevailing approach is to try to manage your way out: bigger vaults, faster rotation, tighter audits, and disparate governance frameworks for various service accounts and agents. Those actions are important given the landscape, but they lose a race they can't win in the agentic case. The count is growing exponentially, but the humans doing the governing are not. You probably can't hire enough people to babysit 80+ credentials per employee. And agentic AI can spin up its own access and demand broad, persistent permissions to do jobs. An agent with a standing credential behaves like an over-privileged insider that never sleeps.
With NuDay, each agent action is brokered against a live policy at the moment it runs, scoped to that specific task, and it expires when the task does. There is no long-lived key sitting on a worker node for an attacker to steal, no secret to leak into a log, and nothing to forget to rotate. A credential that was never issued can't become the second-largest root cause of your next breach.
That is the difference between managing the 80-to-1 problem and eliminating the biggest threat from it altogether. The enterprises that scale agents safely over the next two years will be the ones that stopped handing their agents standing credentials in the first place. Everyone else will be contemplating rotating keys they are too scared to rotate, and individually managing machine identities they long ago lost the ability to keep up with.