IBM has announced a set of identity, credential, discovery, containment and evaluation capabilities for enterprise AI agents at its TechXchange 2026 event in Atlanta. The rollout includes the general availability of IBM Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault 2.2, aimed at developers, IT and security teams running agents across business systems with defined authority and accountability.
The timing reflects a governance gap IBM says is widening fast. Citing Gartner, the company notes that the average Fortune 500 enterprise is forecast to have more than 150,000 agents in use by 2028, up from fewer than 15 in 2025, while only 13% of organizations believe they have the right agent governance in place. Persistent credentials, unclear ownership and disconnected controls are the obstacles the new capabilities target.
Agent Identity registers each agent in a central inventory with its owner, metadata, risk classification, approved tool connections and lifecycle state. It issues short-lived, task-scoped tokens, preserves on-behalf-of delegation so an action can be traced to a person, approval or upstream system, and keeps structured audit trails for compliance and incident investigation. Working with Vault, it provides just-in-time, target-specific credentials for systems that cannot consume delegated tokens, enforcing least-privilege access with real-time revocation when an agent tries something unauthorized. Vault 2.2 also gives agents their own secured accounts, automatically renews credentials and adds post-quantum encryption.
On the orchestration side, watsonx Orchestrate adds discovery in technical preview across third-party platforms including Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Gemini, sandbox containment with a kill switch for rogue agents, and generally available evaluation tooling with cost tracking for models and tokens. Secure Hub, in public preview, adds centralized visibility across distributed Vault deployments, and the stack integrates with NVIDIA’s OpenShell secure runtime. Enterprises comparing agent platforms can explore options such as Moveworks, Botpress and Cognigy, or read our Gemini vs Copilot comparison.
Source: Unite.AI
