Intelligent trust is not just a bonus for artificial intelligence systems, but a vital factor in their success.

Although the AI train doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon, security concerns and unreliable outputs are putting the brakes on AI adoption. The increase in autonomous AI agents and lack of consistent AI guardrails could leave organizations exposed to cyber-attackers if the gaps in security are not addressed in a timely manner.

Digital trust company DigiCert Inc. aims to play a crucial role in increasing AI trust by enabling customers to control and verify their agents. Intelligent trust is the foundation of its new releases, which answer the challenge of verifying content authenticity in the age of AI.

“Intelligent trust is becoming foundational to how digital businesses operate,” said Krista Case, principal analyst for theCUBE Research. “The real shift is toward coordinating identity, integrity and trust signals across environments that are constantly changing. Organizations that treat trust as infrastructure will be far better positioned to scale securely.”

Ahead of the DigiCert Trust Summit, theCUBE takes a look at how the enterprise world can implement AI without compromising on trust and reliability. The event will see DigiCert leaders and experts in digital trust gather to discuss the evolution of intelligent trust and AI governance.

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s exploration of how intelligent trust is becoming essential to secure, verifiable and production-ready AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Concerns over AI governance are snowballing

The fears around governing unpredictable AI models have only grown in recent months. Over 70% of organizations are already deploying AI-powered security tools, yet nearly 90% remain unprepared for AI-driven threats, according to theCUBE Research.

The rise of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent, and NemoClaw, Nvidia Corp.’s version of OpenClaw, has opened up huge security risks, forcing companies to take a harder look at their AI strategy. If AI agents are let loose within an enterprise system, they could wreak havoc — especially when they open the doors to public internet access.

“Organizations are moving past AI experimentation into production, and that’s where trust becomes enforceable, not theoretical,” said Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst for theCUBE Research. “The challenge now is validating models, securing AI agents and ensuring content authenticity continuously; this is where integrated trust platforms differentiate.”

Research shows that responsible AI lags significantly behind AI capabilities, sparking concerns about whether the agentic AI market is expanding too fast for the enterprise world to manage it safely. In 2026 alone, there were 362 documented “AI incidents,” up from 233 in 2024. Cybersecurity firms are still struggling to keep up.

“It’s a breakneck pace that I’ve never seen in my career in technology,” said George Kurtz, president and chief executive officer of CrowdStrike Inc., during his keynote remarks at RSAC in San Francisco. “The problem is we’re doing 200 miles per hour in the car and we’re arguing about what radio station to listen to.”

The biggest obstacles to better AI governance are knowledge gaps, budget constraints and regulatory uncertainty. If organizations want to secure their data, they have to act fast, according to Case. AI-specific governance roles grew 17% in 2025, suggesting positive movement in that direction.

“AI is moving into production faster than most organizations can govern it,” she said. “The challenge now is continuous validation. Enterprises need to understand what their AI systems are doing, how they’re behaving and whether they can be trusted in real time. That’s where operational maturity starts to show.”

Intelligent trust frameworks are a necessity in the AI era

TheCUBE Research predicts that by 2026, 30% of regulated workloads and up to 60% of nonregulated environments will have AI embedded directly into production systems. Currently, more than 90% of software organizations are already using or evaluating AI in development pipelines.

These statistics show that developing an intelligent trust framework is not just a “nice to have,” but a mandate if companies want to keep their enterprise systems secure.

“Intelligent trust is emerging as more than a security concept; it’s becoming an operational framework,” Nashawaty said. “What DigiCert is doing is unifying PKI, DNS, software integrity and device identity into a single control plane, which is exactly what enterprises need to secure increasingly autonomous, AI-driven environments at scale.”

DigiCert has been quick to implement intelligent trust initiatives, including a new AI Trust framework, which helps organizations secure AI systems and their outputs. The unified trust layer includes AI Agent Trust, which authenticates and governs AI agents, and AI Model Trust, which provides cryptographic protection and verification for AI models.

The goal is to create an automated trust architecture that allows organizations to enforce identity-based governance, provide consistent verification of AI models and establish content provenance across one, unified system.

“AI has created a new trust challenge,” said Amit Sinha, chief executive officer of DigiCert. “Organizations are relying on agents, models and content they can’t always verify. At DigiCert, our purpose is to give people confidence in the security, privacy and authenticity of their digital interactions.”

New regulations are also forcing companies’ hands when it comes to the development of intelligent trust solutions. The CA/Browser Forum recently voted to reduce TLS certificate lifetimes to 47 days, making automation a requirement for effective certificate lifecycle management. The move signals a push toward more modern security procedures.

“Regulation is raising the bar on how organizations prove trust,” Case said. “Point-in-time compliance is giving way to continuous validation of identity, data integrity and system resilience. Security teams are being pushed into a more operational role, with accountability for how trust is delivered across the business.”

Post-quantum cryptography throws a wrench in the security works

On top of regulatory pressure, companies face the looming threat of post-quantum cryptography. The upcoming “Q-day”  — the day when quantum computers will be able to break current public key cryptography — means that companies have to start rethinking their entire security system now.

“The convergence of post-quantum cryptography and shorter certificate lifecycles is forcing a major shift in operational discipline,” Nashawaty said. “Enterprises need crypto agility now — not later — and the 47-day certificate mandate is accelerating automation, visibility and modernization across PKI and DNS environments.”

Although quantum computing has been of conceptual interest for a long time, recent advances make the conversation around post-quantum cryptography feel much more urgent. Google LLC,  Microsoft Corp., Amazon Web Services and, more recently, Nvidia Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. have all announced quantum processors. Sinha predicts that post-quantum will have its own “ChatGPT moment” in the years to come, with all the big tech firms racing to cross the quantum finish line first.

“My bet is this is the year where most organizations, the vast majority of them, accept that the time to act is now,” Sinha told theCUBE during the DigiCert World Quantum Readiness Day. “They all have to move and upgrade their digital trust fabric to make it quantum-safe.”

The needle is moving in the right direction. More than 60% of organizations now treat observability as mission-critical infrastructure for AI and cloud-native systems, according to theCUBE Research. Security products such as DigiCert’s Content Trust Manager, which enables organizations to cryptographically sign and verify digital content using the C2PA standard, are leading the way.

“Post-quantum is accelerating a conversation that should already be underway,” Case said. “Most organizations still lack the visibility and agility to manage cryptography at scale. Quantum will expose those gaps quickly. The priority now is building the ability to adapt crypto environments without disruption.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the DigiCert Trust Summit. Neither DigiCert, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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