Blog

Flipping of 2025 to 2026 on wooden block cube for preparation new year change and start new business target strategy concept.

2025 didn’t “break” IAM. It simply exposed its limits.For years, we’ve treated Identity and Access Management as a technical plumbing problem. But as we look toward 2026, the data is clear: the traditional, manual-heavy approach has hit a wall. Enterprises are no longer struggling with technology; they are struggling with complexity at scale.Here are the 5 hard lessons 2025 left behind and why they make LLM-native identity the only path forward.<h3>Lesson #1: IAM projects are still too slow for business reality</h3>We’ve often discussed <a data-mce-href="https://iamones.ai/blog/real-talk--why-your-iam-project-takes-12-months--and-how-to-cut-it-to-3" href="https://iamones.ai/blog/real-talk--why-your-iam-project-takes-12-months--and-how-to-cut-it-to-3">why IAM projects take 12 months</a>, but 2025 proved that the world no longer waits. While business units spin up new AI-driven workflows in days, IAM teams are still stuck in manual onboarding and rigid policy engineering.<ul><li>The Insight: Speed is no longer a "nice to have", it’s a governance requirement. If it takes months to secure a new process, the business will bypass the process entirely, creating massive shadow IT risks.</li></ul><h3>Lesson #2: Automation is not Intelligence</h3>This year, many learned that automating a bad process just makes things fail faster. Traditional workflows are "dumb", they follow triggers but don't understand context. The shift toward <a data-mce-href="https://iamones.ai/blog/reason--plan--act--putting-ai-agents-to-work-in-iam" href="https://iamones.ai/blog/reason--plan--act--putting-ai-agents-to-work-in-iam">Agentic IAM</a> showed us that we need systems that can Reason, Plan, and Act.<ul><li>The Point: If policies can’t reason, they can’t adapt. Static rules fail the moment a user’s behavior or an organization’s structure shifts slightly outside the "if/then" logic.</li></ul><h3>Lesson #3: Compliance is becoming linguistic, not just technical</h3>With the EU AI Act and tighter audit trails, the "how" of access is no longer enough; auditors want the "why." We’ve seen a rise in natural language exploits where the vulnerability isn't a bug in the code, but a flaw in the linguistic logic of a policy.<ul><li>The Insight: The new attack surface is language, and so is the new control layer. To be compliant in 2026, your IAM must be able to explain itself in plain English (or Italian), not just in log files. </li></ul><h3>Lesson #4: IAM teams are drowning in questions, not tickets</h3>The most successful IAM leads in 2025 stopped acting like librarians and started acting like analysts. The bottleneck isn't "resetting passwords" anymore; it's answering complex questions:<ul><li>"What changed after the reorg?"</li><li>"Who has access to our sensitive financial LLM, and why?"</li><li>"Which identities are currently exhibiting risky patterns?"</li><li>The Conclusion: In 2026, IAM will be judged on answers, not workflows. Efficiency is now measured by the time it takes to get a reliable insight. </li></ul><h3>Lesson #5: The market validated the shift</h3>2025 was the year LLM-native IAM moved from "interesting" to "credible." Through strategic partnerships and "Rising Star" recognitions, we’ve seen real-world pilots replace thousands of manual hours with AI-native reasoning. The skeptics have been quieted by the ROI of early adopters.<h3>2026: The Year of Language-First Identity</h3>2026 won’t be about "adding AI" to your existing IAM. It will be about re-thinking IAM as a language-first system. The legacy approach of building rigid silos is ending. We are moving toward a future where identity is fluid, conversational, and deeply intelligent.At IAMONES, we didn't just add a chatbot to a legacy platform; we built the system for this exact shift. We believe the future of security isn't just about locking doors, but about understanding who is walking through them and why.Ready to see how LLM-native identity can solve your 2025 "audit pain"? <a data-mce-href="https://iamones.ai/contact" href="https://iamones.ai/contact" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Let’s talk about your use case</a>.

What 2025 Taught Us About IAM and Why 2026 Will Be the Year of LLM-Native Identity

Can We Talk as difficult conversation concept

For decades, we’ve been told a lie about Identity and Access Management: that it has to be complex. That it requires armies of consultants, endless lines of code, and rigid interfaces that feel like they were designed in another century.We’ve been forced to accept that translating simple business needs into system policies should be a slow, painful, and expensive process.Well, the era of accepting that is over.IAM is standing at a crossroads, and the old road is a dead end. While legacy vendors, even those in the cloud, continue to pile new features on top of outdated, "pre-LLM" architectures, a tectonic shift has happened.We call it being ‘Born-on-the-LLM.’It’s a new paradigm where the user interface isn't a complex web of menus and buttons, but the most natural one in the world: your own language. At IAMONES, we’re not just bolting a chatbot onto an old engine. We’ve built a platform from the ground up where you can “Ask anything, Configure everything, using only your Mother Tongue.”What does this actually mean in practice?<ul><li>Instead of coding a workflow, you state your intent: "If a non-manager requests a new permission, the request must first be approved by their manager. If risk is high, route to Andrea Rossi for final approval.”</li><li>Instead of wrestling with rule engines, you define a policy: "If a user has both AP Accounting and Invoice Approval roles in SAP, classify it as a High-Risk SoD violation.”</li><li>Instead of manually building campaigns, you give an instruction: "Create an access review for all Finance managers. They must review their team's SAP permissions within 15 days. Escalate any non-completed reviews."</li></ul>This isn't an incremental improvement. It's a complete transformation from a technical exercise into a conversational dialogue.But how do you get there without ripping and replacing the systems you already have? And how do you separate the real, LLM-native platforms from the marketing hype?In our new white paper, "Talk, don't Code", we break down this new reality. We detail the pragmatic journey to Conversational IAM, starting with augmenting your current IGA platform to eliminate the friction, then moving to a smarter, more agile future.Ready to stop wrestling with outdated systems?[<a data-mce-href="https://iamones.ai/white-paper" href="https://iamones.ai/white-paper" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Download the full white paper: "Talk, don't Code" now</a>]

Talk, Don’t Code: Why Your IAM Strategy Is About to Change Forever

EU AI Act, regulation on artificial intelligence

<h3>An Introduction to Our Approach</h3>With the adoption of the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act in 2024, a new standard for AI regulation has been set. From the very beginning of our journey in building IAMONES, our goal was not just to innovate, but to do so responsibly. This meant engineering our platform with a "privacy-by-design and compliance-by-default" philosophy.Under the AI Act, we are classified as a deployer of AI systems, meaning we integrate leading Large Language Models (LLMs) into our services. This role comes with clear responsibilities, particularly under Article 26 (human oversight) and Article 50 (transparency), which we have taken to heart. This article provides an inside look at the deliberate architectural decisions we made to ensure IAMONES has a low-to-limited risk profile, allowing our clients to adopt Conversational IGA with confidence.<h3>Our Foundational Principles for Compliance</h3>Our compliance posture is built on several key decisions about what we do, and just as importantly, what we choose not to do.<ul><li>A Core Principle: We Do Not Train Models on Customer Data. </li></ul>This is a critical distinction for us. The reasoning engines within IAMONES operate purely on inference. We do not perform any form of automatic or "silent" learning from user actions or data. This means your information is never used to train or modify our models. This was a fundamental choice to guarantee that our outputs are shaped by controlled, secure prompts, not by ongoing data capture.<ul><li>How We Protect Your Data: Programmatic PII Stripping. </li></ul>We built a non-negotiable safeguard into our data flow: before any information is processed by an external LLM, all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is programmatically stripped. This ensures that sensitive data, such as names or email addresses, never leaves your enterprise boundary in its raw form. For example, a dataset like { "name": "John", "surname": "Doe", "entitlement": "Admin Access"} is instantly transformed into { "name": [NAME], “surname”: [SURNAME], "entitlement": "Admin Access"} before the LLM sees it.<ul><li>Keeping Humans in Control: Our Approach to Oversight. </li></ul>We firmly believe that AI should assist, not replace, human judgment. That’s why we designed IAMONES to treat all AI-generated output as strictly advisory. Any action that could trigger a change in an IGA system—like revoking a permission—is always subject to human-in-the-loop validation before execution. For critical functions, we intentionally pause the process at defined checkpoints to require manual inspection and explicit approval. <h3>The Security Layers We've Built</h3>To support our compliance principles, we have implemented multiple layers of security and governance:<ul><li>An Integrated LLM Firewall: We developed a semantic firewall that intercepts all input queries. It’s designed to block malicious prompt injections, privilege escalation attempts, and inappropriate content before they can be processed.</li><li>Data Residency and Segregation: We support EU data residency for all LLM interactions and provide each client with their own dedicated Temporal Identity Graph (TIG). This guarantees that your IGA data is never shared or exposed across tenants.</li><li>Strict, Granular Access Controls: Our platform translates natural language visibility policies into strict Row-Level Security (RLS) policies at the database level, ensuring users can only see the data they are explicitly authorized to view. </li></ul><h3>Our Ongoing Commitment</h3>Compliance isn't a one-time checklist. It's an ongoing commitment.&nbsp;We conduct annual AI compliance reviews and continuously expand our documentation to ensure we not only meet but exceed regulatory standards as they evolve. This is our promise to our customers: to be a trusted partner in their journey toward a secure and compliant AI-powered future.

How We Engineered IAMONES for EU AI Act Compliance

You have to migrate off your legacy IAM platform today. Many companies, just like yours, are looking to drastically simplify and cut the operational costs of their legacy on-premise IGA platforms, often built more than a decade ago.Until recently, the “move to cloud” was seen as the only path to modernization. But today, the scenario has changed. There's a second option, a strategic crossroads: moving to Born-on-the-LLM vendors.<h3>What's the Real Difference? (Hint: It's Not the Chatbot)</h3>It’s not about having a conversational chatbot, which will be a commodity in 2–3 years. The real, profound breakthrough lies in how you configure and run the system.With a Born-on-the-LLM platform,&nbsp;you program and configure in natural language. No coding, no product specialists. A functional expert can simply write a workflow in plain language (e.g., French), and it just works. In this new paradigm,&nbsp;natural language is the code.In contrast, traditional vendors may add a chatbot layer, but their underlying configuration is still bound to code, semi-code, or endless parameter tuning.<h3>How to Spot a Traditional Vendor? Age Doesn't Lie.</h3>A good way to spot a traditional vendor? Age. Any platform designed before 2023 had no LLM option, it had to be built the old way, maybe with some “Machine Learning” added later. But let’s be clear: ML is not LLM.The TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) comparison is straightforward:&nbsp;hours vs. weeks, agility vs. rigidity, auditor-friendly vs. auditor-adverse.<h3>The Future of IAM is a Choice</h3>Now, let’s be honest: the IAM world is still conservative. A good chunk of practitioners believe AI and LLM are just hype. But there’s a growing faction that clearly sees their potential and benefits.So, this is the crossroad you are facing: will you go Traditional, or will you go Born-on-the-LLM?&nbsp;

Your IAM Platform is at a Crossroads: Traditional or Born-on-the-LLM?

Retro Computer Setup Featuring CRT Monitor On Desk

For years, we’ve been told that Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a fundamentally broken discipline. We've accepted that projects will be slow, interfaces will be clunky, and getting a simple policy implemented requires a small army of consultants and developers.But what if we've been looking at the problem all wrong? IAM isn't truly broken. The core engines of our Identity Governance (IGA) platforms are powerful. They can manage millions of entitlements and enforce complex rules.The problem is that they're hopelessly outdated. The way we interact with these powerful systems is stuck in the past, trapped behind user interfaces and configuration models designed decades ago.<h3>The Friction of Translation</h3>If you work with a legacy IAM stack, you live this frustration every day. You know exactly what you want to do, but getting the system to understand you is a nightmare. You're forced to become a translator, converting clear business intent into a cryptic series of clicks, dropdown menus, and custom scripts.<ul><li>You want to say: "Create a role for contractors that gives them VPN access and read-only rights to the 'Project-Alpha' SharePoint site, but only for 90 days."</li><li>The system forces you to: Navigate 12 different screens, create an access policy, define a role, set lifecycle parameters, find the correct application entitlements, and link them all together, praying you didn't miss a step. </li></ul>This gap between human intent and system logic is the source of all the pain. It’s what makes IAM slow, expensive, and inflexible. The system itself isn’t broken; the user experience is.<h3>Language is the Ultimate User Interface</h3>So, how do we fix it? Not with another layer of complex UI, but by ditching the old model entirely. The solution is to use the most intuitive interface ever created: natural language.Conversational AI isn't just a "nice-to-have" feature. It is the necessary evolutionary step to rescue IAM from its own complexity. It’s an intelligent layer that sits on top of your existing stack and finally allows you to speak the same language.At IAMONES, we’ve built our platform on this very principle. Instead of forcing you to learn the machine's language, we taught the machine to understand yours.When you can simply state your policy, the entire dynamic changes. The weeks of configuration and translation become minutes of conversation. You can finally manage by intent, not by clicks.<h3>The IAMONES Way:</h3>You tell our platform: "Create a temporary role for contractors. They need VPN and read-only access to the 'Project-Alpha' SharePoint site. The role should expire after 90 days."Our conversational AI understands the entities ("contractor role"), the entitlements ("VPN," "SharePoint"), the permissions ("read-only"), and the lifecycle ("expire after 90 days"). It then does the heavy lifting, structuring the logic and configuring the policy in your underlying IGA system.<h3>Stop Working Around the Problem</h3>For too long, the industry's answer has been more training, more consultants, and more custom code to work around the limitations of legacy UIs. That’s like trying to fix a confusing road map by hiring a team of navigators instead of just using a GPS.The technology to bridge the gap between you and your IAM system is here. It’s time to stop blaming the tools and start demanding a better way to control them. The future of IAM is not about replacing your core infrastructure, but augmenting it with the power of language.

IAM is Not Broken. It’s Just Outdated. Let’s Fix It With Language.

Onboarding Process Concept. Business professional illustrating a digital onboarding process with icons for recruitment, onboarding worker management, new employee training, and employee journey.

If you're still onboarding applications into your IAM system with spreadsheets, endless meetings, and manual configurations, we need to have a serious talk. Because that process isn't just slow, it's fundamentally broken, and it's costing you more than you think.For system integrators and IT operations teams, the story is painfully familiar. A new app needs to be integrated, and you're immediately trapped in a cycle of trying to translate complex business needs into the rigid, unforgiving language of your IGA platform. It’s a tedious process that drains time, budget, and morale.<h3>The High Cost of Manual Onboarding</h3>Let's be blunt. This old way of working kills your efficiency and security.<ul><li>Glacial Timelines: What should take minutes stretches into weeks or even months, leaving your business waiting and your IT team bogged down.</li><li>Human Error &amp; Security Gaps: Every manual step is a chance to misconfigure a permission or create a security hole. In IAM, small mistakes lead to big breaches.</li><li>Business Agility Gridlock: In a market that demands speed, the inability to integrate new tools quickly means you’re not just falling behind, you’re holding the business back. </li></ul><h3>The Fix: Stop Translating, Start Reasoning</h3>The solution isn't a better spreadsheet. It’s a complete paradigm shift powered by semantic enrichment: a core capability built into the IAMONES platform today.&nbsp;We use the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand intent and context, just like a human expert would.Instead of manually mapping roles and entitlements, you simply describe what you need in plain English.<h3>The Old Way (Weeks of Pain):</h3>You spend weeks in workshops trying to explain that a "Sales Director" in the new CRM should see all contacts in their region, but only edit the accounts managed by their direct team. Then you cross your fingers and hope the implementation matches the intent.<h3>The IAMONES Way (Minutes to Done):</h3>You tell our platform: "Onboard the new CRM. Grant Sales Directors read-access to all regional contacts and edit-rights only for accounts managed by their direct reports."Our conversational AI parses this, understands the logic, and translates it into the precise technical configuration for your existing IGA solution, whether it's SailPoint, One Identity, OpenText, Saviynt, or another platform. The weeks-long slog becomes a task completed in minutes.<h3>Stop Living in the Past</h3>For the system integrators and IT ops pros in the trenches, this means radical speed, fewer screw-ups, and the ability to supercharge the IGA tools you already own. There's no need to rip and replace.Continuing with manual application onboarding today is like showing up to a meeting with a flip phone. It might technically work, but it sends a clear message: you’re not keeping up. The technology to eliminate this bottleneck is here now. It's time to stop being a translator of business requests and start managing an intelligent, automated IAM ecosystem.

Are You Still Onboarding Apps Manually? Let’s Talk About That…

iamones

identity & access management

Poppins

Roboto

This website uses cookies. Please refer to the Privacy &amp; Cookie policy for more details.

Blog

What 2025 Taught Us About IAM and Why 2026 Will Be the Ye...

Talk, Don’t Code: Why Your IAM Strategy Is About to Chang...

How We Engineered IAMONES for EU AI Act Compliance

Your IAM Platform is at a Crossroads: Traditional or Born...

IAM is Not Broken. It’s Just Outdated. Let’s Fix It With ...

Are You Still Onboarding Apps Manually? Let’s Talk About ...