Your next privileged user might not be human
We’re used to thinking about privileged users as people.
IT administrators, senior employees or anyone with access to sensitive systems and data. We protect their accounts, limit what they can do and, ideally, remove that access when they no longer need it.
But the next privileged user in your business might not be a person at all.
AI is moving beyond answering questions and helping someone write an email. AI agents can now be given a task and allowed to get on with it. They might monitor a mailbox, update the CRM, retrieve documents, arrange meetings or produce and distribute reports.
That could be genuinely useful. But to do any of it, the agent needs access—and this is where things become more interesting from a security point of view.
What are you actually allowing it to do?
Imagine an AI agent has been introduced to help manage customer enquiries.
To be effective, it may need to read incoming emails, look up customer details, access previous correspondence, update the CRM and draft a reply. Someone might then decide it would save even more time if the agent could send those replies automatically.
None of those permissions sounds particularly alarming on its own. Put them together, though, and you have something that can access customer information, change business records and communicate externally using the company’s identity.
That is a privileged user, even if nobody calls it one.
The concern isn’t that the agent will suddenly develop bad intentions. The more realistic risk is that it does exactly what it thinks it has been asked to do, but gets it wrong.
Perhaps it includes sensitive information in the wrong response. Maybe it updates hundreds of records incorrectly. Or it acts on instructions contained in a malicious email without understanding that the sender is attempting to manipulate it.
This last example is known as prompt injection. In simple terms, an AI agent encounters content designed to influence its behaviour. The potential impact depends largely on what the agent has permission to access and change.
If it can only categorise an email, the damage is limited. If it can read customer records, alter information and send messages, it is a different matter.
There is also the question of scale. A person can make a mistake, but usually one action at a time. An agent could repeat the same mistake across hundreds or thousands of records before anyone notices.
Treat it like a new member of staff
A useful way to approach this is to treat an AI agent like a new starter.
You would not give a new employee access to every system on their first day and simply hope they use it sensibly. You would decide what their role requires, give them the appropriate access and make someone responsible for them.
The same questions should be asked of an AI agent:
- What job is it there to do?
- Who is responsible for it?
- What information does it really need?
- Can it only read data, or can it also change and delete it?
- Which actions still need a person’s approval?
- Can you see what it has done?
- Who removes its access when it is no longer being used?
An agent that drafts emails does not automatically need permission to send them. One that produces a report may not need access to every document in the business. Anything involving payments, deletions, external communications or changes to access should probably retain a human approval step.
The principle is straightforward: start with very little access and add only what is genuinely required.
Do you know which agents you already have?
This may become the harder question.
AI features are appearing inside the platforms businesses already use. Employees can connect tools, create workflows and automate tasks without necessarily thinking of what they have built as an “AI agent”.
That makes it easy for agents to appear without the same checks that would apply to a new user or business application.
A useful first step isn’t to write a lengthy AI policy or ban everything. It is simply to find out what is already happening.
Which AI tools are connected to company systems? What can they access? Are any taking action without human approval? Does each one have a clear owner?
AI agents may be relatively new, but the security principles needed to manage them are not. Know what you have, limit access, keep a record of activity and make someone accountable.
Your next privileged user might not be human.
That doesn’t mean it should be trusted by default.
If your business is starting to introduce AI and automation, now is a good time to look at what those tools can access—not just what they promise to do.