The Exchanges

Q Yeah, that is fascinating. Um, you know, as we're talking, I'm just thinking again about the cybersecurity. We said we'd talk about the cybersecurity side of things. Um, could you see these new agents opening up new cybersecurity challenges for companies?

A Of course. So for instance, there's a thirty-five billion dollar TAM market behind, uh, anything to do with identity. It's, it's called IAM or SIAM, so Customer Identity Access Management. And you've got companies there that are behemoths that deal with identity, but don't know how to cope with machine customers and, and AI agents because they can't decipher if a user is indeed an AI agent or not. So where does this World Cup go to? And it presents a huge opportunity for cyber criminals again around fake identities. It also, imagine you're, you were a bank robber. Imagine that was your career choice, but, but a real bank robber in the physical world, and imagine you could use a robot that looks and behaves and walks like a real human being, and that robot cannot be associated with you, or it's going to be very difficult to associate that robot with you, and you would send that robot to rob a bank on your behalf. Perfect crime. I mean, if the body's caught, How can you be associated with it? It's, it's, it's crazy. Similar to that, a lot of new, uh, criminal enterprise and criminal opportunities are gonna arise from the fact that you can use a proxy, basically, an AI agent to, to, to work on your behalf, to commit crimes on your behalf, and much, much more.

AI assessment note: “Of course. So for instance, there's a thirty-five billion dollar TAM market”

Q So how do you then work on matching the identity, uh, between, let's say, bots, customers, um, whoever's visiting a website?

A So we've done bots and non-human detection. Again, originally that was the plan also to check your AI and hence check that AI. And we've been doing it for years. Now, um, a couple of months ago, we acquired a company called deduce.com, which, uh, uh, produces what I believe is the best identity graph out there. It's certainly the best I've come across to, uh, across startups as well as incumbent players together. Marrying the identity graph together with human, not human. And obviously it's way more granular than that. It's not just human, not human. It's AI agents that are good versus AI agents that are bad and so on and so forth. Marrying those two allows us to not just understand that this is Alex's, uh, AI agent. It's also legit working on behalf of Alex from your device and so on and so forth. But that's how we're looking at it.

AI assessment note: “Marrying the identity graph together with human, not human.”

Q uh, from open AI? For sure. Uh, but I don't know again, if it's, um, if it's really up to the point where I'd be using it, uh, every day. So I am kind of curious what your experience has been with these bots and how, um, you know, how they perform today and what you expect them to do moving forward. Like, are they just going to keep improving?

A Without a doubt, without a doubt, I've got no question that AI agents are going to be able to do every single thing that a human being can do, I think, and that they're going to improve massively. I don't think people are going to be able or willing to pay so much for an AI agent as they do. Certainly everyone who can afford a personal assistant would go the AI agent route, but, um, I think the real questions there are Not if, and do not revolve around whether the technology is going to be good enough, nor whether it's going to be too expensive, because it's not, there's a hundred percent chance, and OpenAI already said it, and the same is going to go with Google Gemini and, and Chrome, their browser, and many others. It's going to be commoditized in terms of pricing. It's going to be either free or costing a modest price, kind of like the base, the, the, not the pro, what is going, the plus package of OpenAI. The questions around it are more the psychological questions of whether the human being would trust that AI agent to do what it needs for that to do. And across many aspects, whether the human users would entrust a third party to hold their login details to their bank account. Would they trust them to really choose The right. Uh, you mentioned kayak earlier and, and renting a car and, you know, whether they really trust them. I think history shows us that the answer is a …

AI assessment note: “Without a doubt, without a doubt, I've got no question that AI agents are going”

Q an interesting thing for them to solve because You're not going to be able to figure out who's who, or maybe you will. So kind of talk us through a little bit about how companies and how you're thinking about this. I mean, do you have to like have your own terms, like a machine customer for an AI coming in? Tell me a little bit about how that works.

A First of all, we believe a check that it is, um, a situation that's going to offer a lot of problems and with a lot of opportunities, obviously, we believe that commerce is going to grow because of it, that human productivity is going to grow because of it, but we also believe that problems are going to erupt both because of how, you know, biomanagement platforms and identity and access management platforms have been operating thus far, which is completely irrelevant for the world of agentic AI. And, and we believe that the solution for it is to be able to, um, understand not just whether a user is a human being or not, but pair it with a continuous scan mouse game, but also pair it with the ability to understand the identity of the user, whether this AI agent is indeed operating on behalf of who they claim they operate for. Is this the AI agent of Alex, or is this my AI agent trying to mask itself as Alex, logging into Alex's bank account? And even more so, the subject matter expertise. You need to understand the world of the CMO, of the chief digital officer, of the customer journey in order to be able to play in the world of agentic AI and to help companies really figure out what they need to do. Both from the customer journey side of things and the digital experience side of things, as well as from the security side of things. You want both to not just a not block or a enab…

AI assessment note: “understand not just whether a user is a human being or not”

Q booking. I would have loved a bot to go do that for me, and because my activity is multi-site, um, it's probably hard for those websites, I would imagine, to figure out Whether I'm the human me or the, let's say, open AI operator version of me going out and doing these searches. So how would a company even begin to try to detect the bot behavior in this situation?

A A hundred percent. It's incredibly difficult. Again, you'd need to hire a company like Chad, which me saying this is very self-serving, but that being said, it is the truth. There's a very high likelihood, in my opinion, that the proprietors behind the main AI agents, like OpenAI, like Google, would find a way to declare an AI agent as one operating on their behalf. That being said, that is the very definition of a loophole. Such a thing kind of exists with Google's robots.txt. Google, many years ago, declared its But that is a aiming at indexing side so they can appear in Google search and it has a signature and it's called robot robots. TXT and that signature has enabled cyber criminals proprietors of other bots to mimic that bot and gain access to places that would have otherwise blocked them. I believe that this is the same Place the AI agents declaring themselves is going to go to. And then you really need a company that can very clearly decipher if a user is an AI agent, a regular body, a human being, a human being with malicious intentions, or one with positive attention, intentions, same as the AI agent, whether it's really operating on the user's behalf and so on and so forth. And here you need to marry A vet expertise with identity expertise. And finally, with the understanding of what's called the digital experience and the customer journey, because you need to enabl…

AI assessment note: “you need to marry A vet expertise with identity expertise”

Q way to guide through a normal way to guide through a website. But if you're a bot, you can maybe do that very differently. It's almost, it's almost like you're creating in some way like a custom API for every visitor because you're again, you're machine to machine and you're going to have to find new ways of communicating to each other. So how is that going to play out?

A It's exactly what it is, and the answer is, the real answer, the honest answer is nobody knows. There are a lot of guesses out there, a lot of guesstimates even, but no one really knows. I've been doing artificial intelligence for about 20 years now, and like, when I remember when Sora by OpenAI came out, I could not have envisioned a day prior to that, that AI is already there. So the understanding where the world of AI is going and the pace in which it's going is incredibly difficult to understand. That being said, it is, um, uh, exactly what you outlined. It's, it could be a completely new language. It could be a custom API for every specific visitor. We don't know yet how many AI agents or companies that are proprietors Of AI agents are going to be there in six months, a year, 10 years. It's a crazy world, and what you need is the adaptive and dynamic ability to always be a step, a step ahead, both a step ahead of the AI agents and how they operate, as well as the cyber criminals that might use them. Now think, let's, I mean, I love Adobe's, uh, digital experience cloud. I love Acquia. I love Salesforce's. Exp digital experience cloud. And there are quite a lot of companies operating in this massive term of a market. They now need to be like, they've invested bajillions of dollars in building the perfect suite to cater for digital experience for human being users. Now, what…

AI assessment note: “the real answer, the honest answer is nobody knows.”