By Annie Badman
Publication Date: 2026-05-08 12:00:00
Shenoy then offered a perspective based on real-world use. He described his institution — a medical research school in the Bronx with more than $250 million in research funding — as “right on the threshold of danger.”
Human identity is well managed. NHI is the new frontier and the stakes are high. An AI agent left uncontrolled in a research lab can quietly become an AI agent making decisions about patient data – without anyone being able to understand how it got there.
“AI agents are like employees, like research assistants,” he said. “There should be a responsibility that falls to the head of the lab, the head of the company. We don’t have that anymore.”
That’s why he started working with IBM. Today, Albert Einstein uses IBM Verify and HashiCorp Vault together – Verify for the human side, Vault for the application side – to bring NHIs under coordinated control before agentic AI continues to scale across the institution.
His advice to other leaders was direct: “This is…”
