Human identities represent people, while non-human identities represent applications, workloads, services, devices, scripts, bots or AI agents.

Human identity lifecycles are often driven by HR events such as hiring, transfer and termination. Non-human lifecycles originate in technical events such as deployment, scaling and decommissioning. Both require ownership, least privilege and monitoring, but non-human governance also emphasizes credential rotation, technical discovery and binding the identity to a responsible owner and workload.