How do these three layers work together to build trust in autonomous AI systems while actually enabling organizations to scale automation?

Yeah, so I think these three layers, as you mentioned, identity validation, audit, and policy enforcement as prerequisites before you can actually let organizations scale.

Because if you do this, I mean, if you were to let AI agents loose on behalf of your customers or on behalf of your employees, Without these kind of three interlinked layers, you're going to end up with things that happen that you don't know why they happened.

You don't know who did them.

You don't know when they happened.

And you don't know whether you can replicate them or explain them.

So you end up in kind of a cowboy coding version of the enterprise, which I don't think anyone wants to go back to.

What is your advice to people listening today to ensure that they are building identity strategies that can support the future without adding unnecessary operational complexities?

Why is that a bad idea? Where does rolling out your own auth go wrong? And then when does a team know it's time to bring in a platform like Fusion Auth?

Yeah, and I think that that actually relates to what you were saying before, where there's security and conversion ramifications for login screen.

I call the login screen the front door to your application, and you can 100% build a front door, but you are often going to be better served by going and buying that front door from a hardware store.

because it will be cheaper, it will be more secure, it will look better, you'll have more options and more varieties.

But Sorry, I like the offline analogies just because the online analogies get abstract pretty quick.

But for people who definitely, we definitely have plenty of customers who come to Fusion Auth and have built their homegrown system.

Sometimes it's built from scratch.

Why build a company around that? Who does that really relate to and matter? I think that the reason that we built this is because

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, and I don't want to forget, I want to add a very important stakeholder, especially for customer identity and access management is the marketing team, right? Or the sales team, like they're very interested in making sure that authentication doesn't overly impact their...

what they're trying to do for the company, right? Which is bring in new business, bring in new customers and keep customers happy.

And the way I think about this is that authentication is the front door to the application.

And especially, again, for customers.

And...

What do you think about when you think about front doors? Well, first of all, you want to make sure that you pick the front door that works for you.

That's kind of, you know, like when I put my future facing cap on where I can see customer I am going in the future, I'm kind of wondering from your perspective, you know, thinking, let's throw a number out there, three years out, what are the things that, you know, really in your mind and you're starting as a strategist to plan around?

What is [laughs] what's the first point of business?

Sure.

There's a ton of stuff you have to do before you pull the trigger.

All kinds of due diligence, which was done, but wasn't really something that I was very deeply involved in, so I'm not gonna even talk about that.

But about a couple days, maybe a week or two before the actual closing date, we started to think about our messaging.

Well, that's not true.

I should be careful.

So what's actually really hard when it comes to, like, integrating this company that you just acquired into your business and making it, like, a successful acquisition?