Non-human identities (NHIs), including service accounts, API keys, cloud workloads, CI/CD pipelines, and autonomous agents, now vastly outnumber human identities in modern enterprises. Industry reporting from CyberArk indicates an average of roughly 82 machine identities per human identity. While ratios will vary by cloud maturity and automation intensity, the directional trend is consistent: machine identities are proliferating faster than governance models are adapting. CyberArk data also suggests that most organizations continue to define privileged users as human-only, even though a substantial proportion of machine identities already hold privileged or sensitive access. This signals a structural control gap: governance frameworks built around human intent and human checkpoints are being applied to identities that operate autonomously and at machine speed. Vaulting credentials alone does not constitute governance. Without clear ownership, lifecycle enforcement, and policy-driven controls, non-human identities become long-lived, over-privileged, and effectively invisible. …