For most organizations, identity governance and administration (IGA) is a painful, manual process driven by one thing: the audit calendar. It’s a cycle of reactive, time-consuming tasks, from chasing down managers to complete access reviews they’ll inevitably “rubber-stamp,” to scrambling to produce reports for auditors. This traditional approach is not only inefficient; it’s an ineffective way to manage risk.
A modern security program requires a shift from this reactive, compliance-driven chore to a proactive, continuous security function. This is the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in IGA. By embedding intelligence into governance processes, AI transforms IGA from a periodic audit exercise into an always-on, risk-reduction engine.
This guide will break down the specific role AI plays in the core pillars of IGA, from access certifications and role engineering to access requests, and explain how it enables a state of continuous compliance and real-time security.
How AI transforms core IGA functions
Integrating artificial intelligence into your IGA program moves beyond theory and delivers tangible, transformative improvements to the core, day-to-day functions of identity governance.
It replaces slow, manual exercises with intelligent, data-driven security controls.
Intelligent access recommendations
Traditional access reviews are famously ineffective, often resulting in managers “rubber-stamping” permissions without real scrutiny due to a lack of context. AI fundamentally changes this by providing reviewers with the critical, data-driven insights they need to make an informed decision.
Example: Instead of just presenting a manager with a long list of users and their access rights, an AI-driven system will add a simple, powerful recommendation: “Revoke - This user has not used this permission in 180 days, and their level of access is an outlier compared to 95% of their peers.” This transforms the review from a low-value administrative chore into a high-value risk reduction exercise.
Automated role engineering and mining
Building and maintaining a clean, least-privilege role model is a massive undertaking that has historically required expensive, months-long consulting engagements. AI can dramatically simplify and accelerate this process by analyzing existing user permissions and actual usage patterns across the entire organization.
PRO TIP: Use an AI-powered IGA platform to continuously mine for potential roles. The AI can analyze the access patterns of everyone in your sales department, for example, and automatically generate a suggested “Sales Role” based on the common set of permissions they all share. This provides a data-driven starting point that is much faster and more accurate than manual analysis and helps to eliminate “role bloat.”
Risk-based access requests
Not all access requests are created equal. A request for a low-risk marketing application is very different from a request for administrative access to a production database. However, traditional IGA systems often treat them the same, routing everything through the same manual approval workflow. AI introduces a dynamic, risk-based approach.
Learn more → User Access Management: How It Works and Key Components - C1
Example: An AI can analyze the real-time risk of a request based on the user’s role, the resource they’re requesting, and the sensitivity of the data. Low-risk requests that match the user’s profile can be approved automatically. A high-risk or anomalous request (e.g., a user suddenly requesting access to a system no one else on their team has) can be automatically flagged and escalated for a higher level of human review and scrutiny.
Proactive separation of duties (SoD) monitoring
Separation of duties (SoD) is a critical compliance control designed to prevent a single user from having a toxic combination of permissions (e.g., the ability to both create a vendor and approve a payment to that vendor). While traditional systems rely on static, pre-defined SoD rules, AI can go a step further.
PRO TIP: A modern, AI-powered IGA system can proactively detect potential SoD violations that static rules might miss by analyzing the relationships between different permissions and how they are actually used. It can warn an approver before they grant access, noting that “Approving this request will create a high-risk SoD violation for this user when combined with their existing access to System X,” preventing a compliance issue before it happens.
The end of the audit fire drills: achieving continuous compliance
When every core function of your IGA program is augmented by artificial intelligence, the ultimate outcome is a fundamental shift in your organization’s entire compliance posture. You move away from a reactive, calendar-driven cycle of painful fire drills and toward a proactive state of continuous assurance.
This is not just an operational improvement but a major strategic advantage with a clear business impact:
- Drastically reduced audit costs: Instead of spending weeks or even months of your team’s time manually gathering data and generating reports for an upcoming audit, the system is always audit-ready. An AI-powered IGA platform can provide auditors with a high-confidence, real-time view of all access controls on demand, dramatically reducing the time and cost of preparation.
- Lower risk of compliance failures: By continuously monitoring for risky permissions, toxic combinations of access, and potential SoD violations, the AI acts as an always-on control, preventing compliance issues before they happen. This significantly lowers the risk of failed audits, regulatory fines, and the reputational damage that comes with them.
- A defensible, high-confidence security program: In the event of a security incident, your organization can instantly and accurately demonstrate to regulators and stakeholders exactly who had access to what, when, and why. This ability to provide a high-confidence, real-time view of your access controls is a critical component of a modern, defensible security program.
How C1 can help
The benefits of an AI-driven IGA program are clear, but achieving them requires more than a legacy tool with a few AI features bolted on. You need a modern platform architected from the ground up for intelligence and automation.
C1 is the AI-native identity security platform designed to transform your governance program from a manual, reactive process into a proactive, intelligent security function.
Meet Thomas: your AI agent for identity governance
Thomas is C1’s first fully automated AI agent, built to take on the most time-consuming and error-prone parts of governance. Think of Thomas as an extension of your team—always on, always consistent, always enforcing policy.
- Automated, intelligent access requests: Thomas approves, denies, or routes requests based on policy, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring policy-driven decisions.
- Risk-based access request:. C1 analyzes the context of a request to help you automate low-risk approvals while ensuring high-risk or anomalous requests get the human scrutiny they need.
- Dynamic governance: With MCP integration, Thomas factors in contextual signals like unusual activity or approver availability to adapt decisions in real time.
- Smarter reviews: Thomas analyzes review tasks, recommends certifications or denials, and escalates as needed—cutting down rubber-stamping and easing audits.
With Thomas in place, your IGA program evolves from reactive to proactive, enforcing least privilege at scale.
Empower teams with Copilot
Copilot is an interactive AI assistant that simplifies governance tasks for your team, turning complex workflows into guided, conversational steps.
- Streamlined setup: Build access policies, run certifications, or create requests without clunky rules or manual effort.
- Smarter decisions: Copilot recommends access adjustments based on user history, risk factors, and prior approvals.
- Risk visibility: Surface anomalies and risk signals across roles and entitlements for more confident decisions.
- Helpdesk automation: Integrates with ticketing systems so requests flow automatically into C1, reducing manual handling and speeding resolution.
Putting AI into practice
C1’s AI capabilities can help you:
- Make access reviews intelligent with data-driven recommendations.
- Enable risk-based approvals that balance automation and human scrutiny.
- Simplify role engineering with analytics that uncover least-privilege roles.
- Move beyond recommendations to agentic orchestration of governance tasks in a secure, human-in-the-loop framework.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you build an intelligent, proactive identity governance program for your business.
FAQs:
How do you measure the ROI of an AI-powered IGA program?
The ROI of an AI-powered IGA program is measured by:
- Reduced operational costs: Calculate the reduction in man-hours spent on manual tasks like preparing for audits and conducting access reviews.
- Risk reduction: Quantify the financial risk of a data breach. A strong IGA program that reduces standing privileges and detects toxic combinations directly lowers this risk.
- Increased efficiency: Measure the time saved by business managers on access reviews and the accelerated speed of access provisioning for employees.
How does AI help with the governance of non-human identities?
Governing non-human identities (like service accounts and API keys) is a major challenge because their numbers are exploding and their access patterns are hard for humans to track. AI is essential for this task because it can analyze the activity of thousands of these identities in real-time, establish a baseline of normal behavior, and automatically flag any deviation that could indicate a compromise or misuse.
