Ping Identity, a long-time heavyweight in enterprise identity and access management (IAM), has announced “Identity for AI,” a new solution aimed squarely at securing and enabling the coming wave of agentic AI—autonomous systems capable of acting, transacting, and collaborating across digital ecosystems.
As AI agents become part of the workforce—negotiating purchases, processing data, and even managing workflows—Ping Identity wants to ensure they do it with accountability. Think of it as giving every AI its own identity badge, access level, and audit trail.
“AI agents are changing how business gets done,” said Andre Durand, CEO and founder of Ping Identity. “With Identity for AI, we give organizations the guardrails to innovate responsibly and with confidence. Identity is becoming the universal language of accountability—for humans and agents alike.”
From Human IAM to AI IAM
Traditional IAM tools were designed for people, devices, and services. But the rise of autonomous AI agents—tools that can make decisions, initiate transactions, and communicate with other systems—has created a new security gap.
Ping’s Identity for AI aims to fill that void with a unified identity fabric for both human and AI identities. The platform will provide enterprises with a single control plane to manage agent visibility, access, governance, and threat protection—all while ensuring human oversight.
In practice, it’s an ambitious attempt to extend enterprise-grade identity management into the world of agentic trust—where autonomous systems operate under strict policy guardrails but still retain flexibility and autonomy.
The Five Pillars of Agentic Identity
Ping Identity’s new framework revolves around five key capabilities:
- Visibility – Discover and map AI agents across the enterprise’s digital estate.
- Onboard and Manage – Centralize control of agents, humans, and their shared resources.
- Authenticate and Authorize – Apply least-privilege access policies for safe delegation.
- Human Oversight – Keep human-in-the-loop accountability over agentic decisions.
- Threat Protection – Detect and mitigate rogue or adversarial AI agents.
Together, these features form the “identity fabric” Ping believes will underpin enterprise AI ecosystems by 2026.
Inside “Identity for AI”: Guardrails for the Autonomous Workforce
Slated for general availability in early 2026, the initial release of Identity for AI will ship with a suite of new technologies:
- Intelligent Access Control for Agents – Extends Ping’s enterprise IAM capabilities to include AI systems, authenticating and authorizing every interaction.
- Agent Registration and Management – Enables visibility, lifecycle tracking, and trust scoring for AI agents across the organization.
- MCP Gateway – Acts as a policy enforcement layer, providing session monitoring, just-in-time credentials, and data loss prevention (DLP).
- Secretless Agentic Identity – Uses zero-knowledge tokens and integrates with third-party vaults to eliminate hard-coded secrets.
- Human Delegation & Oversight – Keeps sensitive operations under explicit human consent and review.
- Agent Detection & Defense – Identifies unauthorized or impersonating AI agents before they can act.
It’s a comprehensive play—part identity management, part security orchestration, part compliance layer for the age of autonomous computing.
The Broader Context: Trust as the Currency of AI
Ping Identity’s move comes as agentic AI systems—autonomous AI assistants, workflow agents, and generative APIs—begin to infiltrate enterprise environments. From Microsoft’s Copilot stack to OpenAI’s GPT-based agents, the question of how to authenticate, authorize, and audit AI behavior is quickly becoming a security priority.
By positioning identity as the connective tissue between human and AI trust, Ping is effectively declaring: if AI is the new workforce, identity is the new HR department.
The company plans to expand Identity for AI throughout 2026, introducing deeper visibility, governance, and privileged access management tailored to autonomous ecosystems.
The Bottom Line
Ping Identity is betting that as enterprises rush to deploy AI agents, trust will be the differentiator between success and risk. Identity for AI might just become the framework that allows businesses to innovate safely—without giving rogue algorithms the keys to the kingdom.
Power Tomorrow’s Intelligence — Build It with TechEdgeAI
