By Rohan Vaidya, Area Vice President, India & SAARC, CyberArk
Identity security will be central to the conflict between human adaptability and technological advancement in 2026. India is entering an era dominated by AI agents, shrinking certificate lifespans, hardware scarcity, and an increasingly complex digital workforce. In this new reality, trust will be just as important as innovation for building resilience.
The first major shift will come from shorter certificate lifecycles. Starting in March 2026, the maximum validity for digital certificates will drop from 398 to 200 days, and Indian businesses will struggle to adapt as many are still manually managing certificate lifecycles. This will result in outages driven by expired certificates or unmanaged machine identities. Automation is crucial to ensuring such a scenario doesn’t happen.
Autonomous AI agents will become a standard part of business workflows. As Indian companies adopt frameworks like the Model Context Protocol, identity will become the main control point. It will be the only reliable “kill switch” when an AI agent acts unpredictably or gets compromised. A single leaked API key or a malicious prompt will be enough to cause system-wide problems.
The benefits of AI won’t be available to everyone. Limited access to advanced chips, rising cloud costs, and data center limitations will strengthen the dominance of major tech companies. For many Indian organisations, scaling AI will be a privilege, not a standard capability.
Human behavior will also be a key factor. Economic pressures will likely increase financially motivated insider threats. The use of unauthorised “shadow AI” tools will grow faster than companies can create rules to manage them. It will become harder to spot false information and social engineering attacks as AI-generated content becomes common.
Looking ahead, the organisations best positioned to operate securely at scale are those that apply Identity Security as a strategic control layer across human, machine, and AI identities. The threat landscape will evolve rapidly, but one core principle remains constant: securing identity is securing the business.”