Securing AI Agent & Human Identities: Auth0

Well, it's, it's really exciting and, and fascinating to hear about everything you guys have shipped thus far, what you're working on, and, and just like thinking about how fast, uh, the, the bar has moved just in, you know, the last like couple of years.

Now, when teams finally sit down to modernize their identity stack, you know, they, they, they like what, um, they're hearing in this podcast.

They wanna start incorporating some of these, these tools and capabilities.

Um, wh-where do you see them sort of underestimate that, the complexity the, the most? Is it the, the human users, the machine identities, or that sort of messy overlap where the two collide? Like I'm just thinking of like scenarios like a-an AI agent acting on behalf of a, a, of a specific employee inside a specific customer organization with that employee's, uh, permissions.

It just gets pretty messy and complex.

Um, and that, that's just three layers of identity, um, stacked on top of each other.

I'm just curious, like where, where do you-- where does the complexity lie?

So today, uh, if I look at this, I would say the overlap between the two, right? The most teams understand by now that human identity in B2B is complicated.

What is still underappreciated is that non-human actors increasingly need to participate in that same model, and companies are picking this up.

But once you start combining the human authority, organizational boundaries, and machine execution, identity becomes much more nuanced.

And the hardest problem in building this coherent across the system where users, organizations, admins, service accounts Uh, and agents are all operating in the same playing field.

We need better trust, we need better authorization framework.

That is the key.

And the teams who are thinking from that lens are going to be better positioned across the board than the ones who are going to treat this as separate problems.

Because that's where we need to consolidate and understand what else can go wrong in the workflows.

Well, we've covered a, a lot of ground thus far, um, and I, I've got, um, a few more questions or so to, to ask both of you.

Um, but I wanna, I, I wanna ask, um, what's a common misconception about B2B SaaS identity that you wish more people understood?

I think the misconception is it's about authentication and simple access and onboarding of users.

And the reality is that the organization is this much more, um, critical container of the local business logic of, of your customer.

And whether you're managing access, um, you know, enabling IT teams to be able to onboard, manage, control their entire organization, whether it's about enforcing security and policy to keep, uh, customers secure, or whether it's about really, uh, enabling more intelligent software, helping the agents that are now running in your product become smarter by accessing your customers' resources in a way that doesn't create risk and liability, um, identity becomes much less about just the individual user and much more about the organization as, again, this, this container for critical business logic.

And when you, when you get that set up right, not only does it decrease the end burden on your end customer, it helps you win more deals, right? You, you are more secure by default, and it allows your products to get smarter through the access to resources and enabling users to get their jobs done more effectively.

So the misconception is that it's this kind of functional must-have basic building block, and I think the reality is that it's increasingly a strategic enabler of revenue growth.

It's how you win deals, it's how you move upmarket, it's how you ensure strict data residency or control and separation, and it's how you enable your end customers to be successful, which translates into happy customers, more growth, more adoption.

And as AI comes in, it's just getting harder.

So if you have a partner can, that can help simplify that for you, um, it frees you up to focus on the things that really matter, scaling your business and your product more broadly.