.png?width=1816&height=566&name=brandmark-design%20(83).png "Tech Channels - IT News, Resources & Insights")
AI agents and non-human identities are proliferating at a head-spinning pace. To say they’re reshaping the cybersecurity landscape is nothing short of an understatement.
And traditional security models just can’t keep up—because they don't know how to. They were built around human users, but organizations are now facing an explosion of machine identities, AI agents, workloads, and automated processes that require the same level of governance, monitoring, and control. At the same time, AI has wrought changes to how organizations operate, forcing leaders to rethink productivity, workforce enablement, process design, and security architecture.
Tech-Channels sat down with Darren Guccione, CEO and cofounder at Keeper Security, at InfoSec Europe, where he presented a keynote address, to explore the rise of non-human identities (NHIs), the challenges organizations face in managing them, the accelerating impact of AI on enterprise operations, and the strategic mindset required to navigate a rapidly changing technology landscape.
Q. Why are NHIs becoming such a significant challenge for organizations?
A. I think there's a dilemma right now, because the majority of all conventional cybersecurity products were only designed for humans, they weren't designed to handle any choice of AI agents. It's forcing vendors to completely retool or re-architect their products.
A principal user for Keeper is a human, a machine, an agent, we don't really care if it's human or not. We assign an identity to all of it. Each user that transacts on either enterprise infrastructure or an endpoint is assigned an identity and a role policy. Then we track, monitor, verify.
Q. What does the growth of AI agents look like in practice?
A. We call this proliferation more of an invasion. If you look at the ratio between NHIs to humans, each one's probably managing like 100 to 150 workloads. I was looking at one computer last week and I said, 'How many agents do you have on your machine?’ They said 432. Those are executable files, dot exe. Each one of those needs to be tracked, monitored, and verified.
Q. How should organizations think about AI amid all the hype?
A. Walking around the Infosec show, you see AI everywhere. At the end of the day, what does that really mean? You could utilize AI to do something faster. We spend a lot of time to figure out what's the work and what's the waste. Work adds value. Waste degrades value. We eliminate as much waste as we possibly can."
If you have a bunch of waste and then you layer an AI, you're just going to pump a lot more of that out. If you have opacity, it doesn't matter what AI you bring in. If you don't have really solid discovery at the endpoint and within your own infrastructure, you're not going to solve this problem.
Q. How quickly is AI transforming enterprise environments?
A. We've been inventing AI since 2009. I've been looking at these models for three years. In the last six months, I can't even compare what I've seen in terms of acceleration and excellence. It has eclipsed all of the last decade. The way that the models are transacting, the speed and accuracy and efficacy of it is so accelerated. I call it violence because it's infiltrating enterprise faster than an enterprise's ability to defend against it.
Most of the products today were not expecting this. A lot of them got caught flat-footed.
Q. What separates organizations that will succeed from those that will struggle?
A. If you don't have a forward-thinking mindset, if you're complacent, you're going to be in real serious trouble. There's 168 hours in a week, not 40. If you're a coin-operated individual that just says, “I want to work 9:01 to 5:01 and just do my thing and go home,” and you don't have this insane passion for solving these types of problems, you're going to be in real serious trouble.
It's more psychology than anything else. There are a lot of smart people out there. We [at Keeper] have a very capable team that's driven by two people that are absolutely fanatical about this."
Q. No one can ignore AI but do they have to go all in?
A. You don't even have to be passionate about it. You just have to accept the reality to which you're given. It's like acknowledging you breathe with oxygen, aren’t willing to accept AI. That's like saying you don't use electricity. AI is the next version of electricity.
At the end of the day you can't ignore it. It's everywhere whether you like it or not. Build it into your DNA. You drink water, you eat food, you use AI, and you breathe oxygen.
Q. How should organizations balance AI and human talent?
A. Make sure you're utilizing AI within your company's workflows to become better and faster. Empower the team members that you have. I see this whole thing, there's a lot of movement around laying people off because we're now AI first. There's some weirdness with that. If your strategy is to eliminate team members to make your company more profitable, yeah, it's going to work.
But the problem is you have to focus on the right side of the seesaw, which is productivity. If you want to turbocharge productivity, you have to look at a human and say, okay, what can they accomplish with AI? Think of how much more you can achieve as a company by doing that. It's exponential.
Q. What is the danger of using AI primarily for cost cutting?
A. To me, that view’s a long-term race to the bottom. There's a balance. You can't take a traditional hiring model that's based on just humans, combine that with AI, and think that that pot is going to naturally change. There's a ratio that you have to figure out as a business between the human component and the AI component. You have to add those two things together and then treat that as almost a single line item.
Q. What role does process design play in successful AI adoption?
A. I'm always working on simplifying everything. If I can have three transactive buttons and reduce it to one or zero, we do it. I'm fanatical about it.
You should do that with any process inside of an organization. Whether it's finance, FP&A, HR, design—it doesn't even matter. When you simplify the process and then you layer in AI, it's a force multiplier like you wouldn't believe.
Q. How does psychology influence technology design?
A. Dissonance plays a huge part. I'm big on psychology. How do I get to a singular decision instead of a binary one? Binary has theoretically twice the bounce rate. I see designs with four or five different choices. Think about what happens psychologically. Your brain has to make a decision. There's a lot that goes into the way that we design products. The way that we think about our business. And then how we implement AI.
AI is not simply another technology trend but rather it represents a fundamental shift in how organizations operate, secure infrastructure, and create value. The rapid growth of NHI and AI agents is forcing enterprises to rethink identity management, governance, and security architectures that were originally built for a human-centric world.
AI alone is not the answer. Organizations must first simplify processes, eliminate waste, and establish visibility across their environments before AI can deliver meaningful outcomes. Those that successfully combine human talent, operational discipline, and AI-driven productivity will be best positioned to thrive. Those that treat AI as a shortcut or cost-cutting mechanism risk falling behind in a landscape that is evolving faster than many organizations are prepared to manage.
