By @venturebeat
Publication Date: 2026-10-01 14:30:00
Presented by Cisco
Enterprises are adding AI agents, applications, workloads, and machine identities far faster than they add employees. Many now plan for a non-human population several times larger than their human one, and identity architecture is what decides how far that growth goes.
Every AI agent needs a verifiable identity, a credential it cannot leak, and a narrow set of permissions before it touches a production system, and the identity and access management (IAM) platforms most enterprises run today weren’t built to issue any of those things to software.
What’s missing is an agentic equivalent to a human onboarding process, which is what gives an employer confidence in a new hire, says Matt Caulfield, VP of product, identity, at Cisco.
“People build trust through a process,” he says. “We know the same person, or the same company hired us, and that company ran a background check, ran an interview, verified our identity at onboarding. None of that exists for agents….
