The 2026 installment of the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Landscape has just published. The report identified three primary drivers currently driving the CIAM landscape.
- AI agents are a new identity type in CIAM. In our research, we found that CIAM solutions are increasingly enabling organizations to:
- Properly manage inbound access of customers’ AI agents (“I want to use a Claude.ai or OpenAI agent to find the best pair of headsets under $100 and launch dozens of shopping agents from Amazon, Google and other providers against eCommerce portals).
- Offer a secure AI agent-based new business interaction channel. (“I want to buy a pair of headsets under $100.”)
- Expose CIAM functionality policy administration as well as external customer self-service as an AI agent.
- CIAM vendors’ own AI agents are helping modernize CIAM deployments. Manual reimplementation of CIAM policies when switching CIAM vendors has traditionally been a “back to square one” reimplementation with high services costs. Many CIAM solutions now include digital worker (CIAM administrator) functionality that helps organizations migrate from one CIAM solution to another, A/B testing, user profile redesign, threat detection and response, account takeover detection and cyber/digital fraud management.
- CIAM use cases are expanding into fraud management and reusable identity. CIAM solutions are becoming integration and orchestration points of not only security (authentication) ceremonies but also contextual business authorization enforcement (especially for AI agents). CIAM solutions now offer productized integration with identity verification solutions, provide their own behavioral biometrics capabilities, and fit into decentralized digital identity-based (verifiable credentials) identity frameworks (e.g., eIDAS 2.0/EUDIW).
As a follow-on to the CIAM Landscape, we will kick off a new Forrester Wave™ on CIAM at the end of September 2026. This will be an update of our last CIAM Wave published in December 2024.
Forrester clients interested in learning more CIAM can schedule a guidance session with me.
