Agents Are Identities Too: Identity Security After CyberArk with Amy Blackshaw
Brandon interviews Amy Blackshaw, Senior Vice President of Identity Marketing at Palo Alto Networks, about identity security in the age of AI agents. Blackshaw, who spent four years leading product marketing at CyberArk before Palo Alto Networks acquired it in February 2026, explains how identity management evolved from an IT operations task into a security discipline, and why identities now need to be protected across their full lifecycle. She walks through the three segments of identity security (access management, privileged access management, and identity governance), argues that human-driven quarterly access reviews are painful and error-prone, and says vendors like Palo Alto Networks are pulling governance into the identity security platform and using AI-driven roles to pre-approve most access. Blackshaw describes how frontier AI models change the attack landscape, with the cost of entry dropping toward zero and attackers moving at machine speed. She cites Unit 42 figures on how fast intrusions reach data exfiltration, an initial access time of about 25 minutes, and a recent investigation in which the full attack took under 10 hours. Her answer is control alongside detection and response: zero standing privileges and just-in-time access, so an attacker who steals a credential reaches a dead end. She and Brandon discuss why the most boring attacks, like a weak password and no second factor, are often the most effective, and why attackers often succeed with hard-coded machine credentials. On agents, Blackshaw says an agent is a machine identity with human-like traits: it can reason, decide, and escalate its own privileges, and you can't MFA it. She argues agents should be first-class identities with least privilege, just-in-time access, lifecycle governance, and a gateway for policy. For human-in-the-loop agents, the person is the anchor and must approve the moments that matter, with guardrails against consent fatigue. For autonomous agents, policy is the anchor, with tightly set permissions, behavior monitoring, and a kill switch. Brandon and Blackshaw also cover how to apply zero standing privilege for admins, developers, and agents without slowing developers down, and why policy and context (time, location, and usual behavior) should decide access. They close on who owns identity, which now rolls up through the CISO and increasingly reaches the CIO and CEO, why identity and security operations teams need to share data, and Blackshaw's case for platformization in a fragmented security market. SHOW: 1071 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1071 Transcript SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/CcaFoJRu0YM SHOW SPONSORS: NordLayer -