We're not missing anything. We're ignoring a large part of the identity populations, which I believe are already underserved. And I believe that they're probably most or least likely to be directly impacted by the agentic AI. We have really two areas which stand out for me, frontline workers and things. In the past, neither of these areas have had the focus it should have, because both of them are very different to where the roots of enterprise identity and access management have started. For example, frontline workers, they work fundamentally differently to how white collar workers do.
Their relationship with identity and access management is very transient. They access systems from whatever device is available, even if the device is not theirs. And usually the device that they're using is not owned by anybody who is actually using it on a daily basis. And when access fails, when they cannot get into the system or do what they're trying to do, then there's a direct impact on the task. So if we have a truck where a bill of loading cannot be completed, then the truck cannot leave.
If it's a doctor or a nurse working in a hospital where they're unable to write notes into a computer, then they can't move on to the next patient. So there is a direct impact. And the situation is very similar for things. We need to be able to authenticate and authorize these things in a transient way. But most enterprises, from my point of view, have not found a solution that actually scales for these things. And the funny thing is that solving these problems actually helps us with identity and access management for AI.
If we can grant a transient user on an unknown device access to what they need for as long as they need it, then essentially we have what we need for the agentic AI. So for me, really, the question remains the same. We need to answer who is trying to access what? And are they entitled? Are they struggled because the requirements are diverse? A single process really fits all these requirements.
So first, it helps to understand what do I mean by the edge? For me, the edge is where identity has to work outside of our organizational environment, our managed environment. That can either be through physical access or system access, or it can be through organizational access across company boundaries. What we have to remember is that enterprise identity access management grew up by modeling single large groups of users with very similar requirements getting access to a set of managed systems and services. Once we move to the edge, this breaks down.
You get many different populations, often much smaller. The requirements are often very specific. And each one of these populations has constraints, which limits the ability to apply solutions, which might be applicable to everybody. Which means we have to really think about finding tight, specific solutions for each one of these different populations. What we also encounter when we go to the edge is that we have a time to value. Users must be effective fast. It cannot be that onboarding a truck driver in the logistics industry where I come from takes us weeks, can't even take days.
It has to take minutes. Otherwise, that person is not going to be able to be productive and work for us. They're going to offer no value. And if we don't find a solution as identity professionals for this, then the organization, they find a way to solve that problem. I call that the path of least resistance. They don't think about the security, they think about getting the job done. This often results in having a shared device with a username and a password stuck to the back of it so that people can just log in with the same username and password and get the work done.
In addition to this setup, we also have the organizational edge. Internally, we've had federation for quite some time. This allows employees to be able to access the applications they need. Once you move to the edge, it's not always employees that you need to grant access to. You need to make sure that you allow different people to get access to the systems that you need. That includes subcontractors, partners, it includes subcontractors of subcontractors. We have to find some form of a relationship to build that trust.
It's not something that we generally have to deal with in the enterprise world. With those two edges, we have a significant change to the problem that we're seeing when we look at enterprise identity and access management. Picture this, it's three o'clock in the morning, it's pouring with rain, it's freezing cold outside. You're wearing gloves, you've got your safety glasses on, and you're using a device which is going to be used by four other people today. On that little device, you've got to complete a single task before you can continue working.
The difference that you see in these areas is that the people and the interactions with identity and access management are transient. They're not sitting at desks, they don't have these dedicated devices. On top of that, they're regularly not your direct employees. You as a central identity and access management team don't have control over all of the circumstances. This is the same if you go into hospitals. It's the same in many of the frontline worker use cases that you see across different industries.
So what we need to do is, in these areas, you have to really focus on both the hardware and the software solutions to make sure that they are fit for purpose, fit for the purpose that is required from the frontline worker, not necessarily just from the security teams. Because there are many, many factors that make solutions successful and fit for purpose for these populations. So the edge puts the identity fabric under stress. It's just like a real piece of fabric.
When you're making a pair of trousers, when you go to the edge, you have to get a special type of sewing machine, an overlocker to solve that so that it doesn't fray and have an impact on the rest of the garment. When it comes to the edge identity, we have to take those same lessons that we find at the edge and use them and apply them into our core identity and access setup. We have to think about delivering solutions that are fit for the specific task at hand. Too often as identity professionals, we build for the masses, and we then try to fit the problem to the solution.
When we take these large solutions, then we find that they don't fit. When we go to the edge, it means we need to be flexible. We need to work around, we need to find a way to fit the solution to the problem. That means being flexible, taking the components of the solutions and applying them sometimes differently to make sure that we provide the most value from our identity and access ecosystem for the whole business.
