Every enterprise identity system ever built started with a human logging in. AI agents don’t work that way: there’s no face behind the login, no single owner, and soon there will be far more of them than there are people to watch over them. That mismatch is why identity teams are starting from scratch with an Agentic Identity Provider, purpose-built to establish what an AI agent actually is before deciding what it’s allowed to do.

Jennifer “JJ” Johnson (pictured), chief marketing officer at CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., has spent five years bringing that kind of announcement to theCUBE’s Fal.Con coverage, and this year’s was built around a blunt ratio: roughly 90 AI agents for every human employee.

“Are you thinking about agent identities the same way as human identities? The answer, of course, is no,” Johnson said. “You’re going to have 90 agents for every human. Let that sink in. Agents don’t operate like humans.”

Johnson spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Fal.Con, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed CrowdStrike’s new Agentic Identity Provider and what it takes to secure a workforce that’s mostly machines. (* Disclosure below.)

Why an Agentic Identity Provider starts before access, not after

CrowdStrike’s Agentic Identity Provider fills a gap in Continuous Identity, the real-time authorization system it detailed in June using technology from its $740 million acquisition of SGNL Inc. Continuous Identity decides whether an agent should be allowed to do something at a given moment. The new provider handles the step before that, establishing what the agent actually is, since most companies currently stand in for agent identity using service accounts and API keys.

“One CISO told me we never even figured out the identity problem for humans,” Johnson said. “I’m going to look at this as a positive: Now let’s figure out how to finally solve the identity problem for agents, and then maybe we can reverse engineer it back to humans.”

The identity announcement arrived alongside a broader push CrowdStrike calls the next evolution of its Agentic SOC: coordinated investigations that follow an attack across endpoint, identity, SaaS, cloud and network simultaneously, the same way autonomous attackers now move. Johnson said the shift reflects how differently agents behave compared with the sequential, one-system-at-a-time attacks security teams used to chase.

“Defending AI with AI at machine speed means you have to get visibility and look cross-domain and act on that simultaneously,” Johnson said. “That’s the single sensor, single platform. That’s the way to do it.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Fal.Con event:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE