Security
CDW Summit 2026: Confronting the Identity Problem for Agentic AI
It’s always been challenging for IT leaders and cybersecurity teams to establish the identity of every user and device connecting to their networks. And granting identity-based access to data and workloads has become a foundational element of most organizations’ security posture. But with the proliferation of artificial intelligence agents, the problem is growing heads like a hydra. AI agents are accessing your environment from within and without, and security teams must find new ways to tackle the problem because nonhuman identities don’t behave like humans work at machine speed. At the CDW Summit 2026 in Dallas, CDW and some of its partners discussed how agents are introducing new vulnerabilities and causing shifts in the threat landscape — and how this trend is forcing organizations to evolve their approach to identity and authentication.
Participants
Jakob Grimm, Director of Global Partner Presales, Okta
Jen Easterly, CEO, RSAC
Ben Weiss, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, CDW
Video Highlights
- Okta’s Jakob Grimm acknowledged the high rate at which artificial intelligence agents are being introduced, claiming that eventually there will “be 50 agentic identities to every one human identity.”
- RSAC’s Jen Easterly pointed out that we’re already seeing agents take actions that were never intended by their creators, such as cheating, hacking and deceiving.
- Experts at the summit agreed that governance is critical, and CDW’s Ben Weiss said it’s important to think about governance holistically because of the number of AI platforms being used and because governance looks a little bit different for each platform.
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