Last week, Identiverse 2025 in Las Vegas brought together more than 3,000 identity professionals, 250+ expert speakers, and industry vendors to exchange knowledge and explore the forces shaping the future of digital identity. The Identiverse keynote speakers did an excellent job setting the stage, with Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity, raising the issue of disintermediation of companies from their customers as Agentic AI performs actions on your behalf through APIs, and customers no longer need to interact with applications directly. Companies will need to adapt and find new ways to establish and maintain relationships with their customers. Michael Coates, former CISO of Twitter and Mozilla, laid out the concerns around validating identities and preventing bad actors in the age of AI. His final takeaway was that “true security isn’t restraint; it’s the foundation that allows innovation to move forward without fear.”
AI was front and center, both as a tool for defending against and for enabling new forms of identity fraud. Multiple sessions and workshops explored how large language models (LLMs) and AI-driven systems are accelerating threats, but also how AI can be harnessed for advanced fraud detection and real-time identity analytics.
Hand in hand with AI is the rise of non-human identities—service accounts, bots, and AI agents— which was also a hot topic. Enterprises often face multiple NHI compromise events, which now get board-level attention. Detecting these accounts is one part of the puzzle. The bigger question is how to secure and clean up accounts to improve your security posture. As AI agents become more prevalent and take on some “decision-making”, the job of securing non-human identities becomes a high priority. While speakers urged organizations to adopt new frameworks for securing machine-based interactions and managing the growing sprawl of automated identities, these are in the early stages and are still maturing. We did find a vendor in the exhibit hall, Aembit, that offers a comprehensive, automated, and policy-driven approach to secure and streamline machine-to-machine interactions. The secret sauce here is eliminating the need for pre-provisioned secrets or static credentials and providing dynamic access governed by conditional access policies.
Identiverse 2025 underscored that protecting identities and managing the security perimeter means embracing AI, securing non-human identities, moving beyond passwords, and staying ahead of regulatory change. As usual, Identiverse was a great conference for learning about the latest innovations and thinking, and it highlighted the key issues we will all face in the next few years.
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By Hanno Ekdahl
