SaaS and AI Security are at a Turning Point
AI adoption accelerated rapidly in 2025, but not in the way many security teams expected. Most third-party AI tools entered organizations the same way SaaS always has, through browser-based apps, OAuth integrations, and user-driven adoption rather than centralized deployment.
At the same time, a wave of high-profile SaaS breaches impacted hundreds of organizations across industries. These incidents weren’t isolated events. They exposed a shared reality: modern enterprises now run on SaaS platforms that are deeply interconnected, identity-driven, and increasingly augmented by AI. These breaches did not stay contained, a single compromise often cascaded across hundreds of downstream organizations.
Together, these forces pushed SaaS and AI security past a tipping point.
Security teams were no longer defending discrete systems or clearly defined perimeters. They were trying to understand and protect living ecosystems of applications, data, identities, integrations, and AI-driven workflows that changed constantly. As we enter 2026, the gap between organizations that adapt to this reality and those that do not is widening fast.
What 2025 Made Impossible to Ignore
1. SaaS and AI Fully Converged
By the end of 2025, it became clear that AI was no longer a separate category of tooling.
AI features were embedded directly into core SaaS platforms like CRM, productivity, HR, engineering, and finance systems. At the same time, standalone AI apps adopted SaaS distribution models, relying on OAuth access, browser sessions, and deep integrations to deliver value. This convergence erased the line between SaaS risk and AI risk.
Every SaaS access decision now implicitly carried AI exposure, data leakage potential, and automation-driven blast radius.
2. Major SaaS Breaches Changed the Industry’s Risk Model
Several high impact SaaS breaches in 2025 reshaped how organizations understood SaaS risk.
The ShinyHunters Salesforce campaign, followed by the Salesloft Drift and Gainsight campaigns, demonstrated how attackers could exploit identities, OAuth grants, and trusted integrations rather than traditional vulnerabilities. In each case, a limited initial compromise enabled broad downstream access across customers and connected systems.
“The SaaS breaches we saw in 2025, from Salesforce OAuth token abuse to vishing-driven access and downstream customer exposure, fundamentally changed how this industry thinks about SaaS risk.”
Yoni Shohet, Co-Founder and CEO
These incidents showed that SaaS breaches no longer stop at organizational boundaries. They propagate through shared platforms, turning individual misconfigurations into ecosystem-wide risk.
3. SaaS Security Programs Began to Mature
In response, 2025 marked a shift away from fragmented SaaS security approaches built around isolated point solutions.
Tools focused solely on discovery, posture, or threat detection proved insufficient as SaaS environments grew more interconnected and dynamic. Leading organizations began forming holistic SaaS security programs anchored in identify, protect, and detect and respond functions. This model enabled consistent governance, continuous visibility, and faster containment across users, data, and integrations.
SaaS security started to resemble an operating discipline rather than a collection of tactical controls.
What 2026 Will Demand from Security Teams
1. AI Agents Introduce a New Risk Surface
In 2026, AI agents will become one of the most important emerging risk factors in SaaS environments. These agents act across systems, manage non-human identities, and make changes at machine speed.
They do not fit neatly into traditional access models or periodic review processes.
“AI agents will displace hyperautomation just as cloud displaced on-prem data centers, delivering an order-of-magnitude gain in business performance while introducing two orders of magnitude more risk. Self-service adoption across business units, explosive interconnectivity, entitlement sprawl, misconfigurations, and overprivileged non-human identities are accelerating faster than security teams’ ability to see and control them.”
Shlomi Matichin, Co-Founder and CTO
As AI agents gain broader permissions and autonomy, security teams will need new ways to understand what they can access, what actions they can take, and how trust is delegated across systems.
2. SaaS Security Will Extend to the Browser
As SaaS usage and AI adoption continue to accelerate, the browser will become an increasingly critical source of security context.
Many of the most important signals about SaaS risk live at the browser level, including user behavior, session activity, and real-time interactions with SaaS and AI tools. Without this context, security teams are left with partial visibility into how access is actually used.
In 2026, effective SaaS security programs will look beyond APIs alone and incorporate browser-level insight to better understand intent, misuse, and exposure.
3. Remediation Will Matter More than Visibility
As SaaS security programs continue to mature, expectations will shift. Visibility will remain necessary, but it will no longer be sufficient. In 2026, the differentiator will be how effectively teams can translate insight into action.
Security leaders will be measured by how well they reduce risk, not just how much they surface. That means moving beyond dashboards toward remediation workflows that are flexible, policy-driven, and aligned with how the business operates.
The focus will be on shortening the time between understanding risk and fixing it, without introducing unnecessary friction.
Looking Ahead
The next phase of SaaS and AI security will not be defined by louder alerts or more tools. It will be defined by clarity in complex environments, context around real risk, and the ability to act decisively as SaaS and AI continue to evolve.
That is the challenge of 2026.
And it is also the opportunity.
If you want to see how leading organizations are finding and fixing SaaS and AI risks continuously, not just at audit time, request a demo and see what modern SaaS and AI security looks like in practice.
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