Hey, good morning, everyone. So, I do have a bit of a journey that I want to share with you, and it really starts by thinking about this opportunity to come and present. And as I was preparing for this talk, I thought, there's a lot of things that are changing in the market. There's a lot of things within the identity business, foundational elements, or some of those building blocks that are changing. And I really think we're actually in what many would call a paradigm shift. I've heard that term paradigm or new paradigm quite often.
Well, as I was thinking about paradigm shift, I thought, you know, I don't know much about it. I actually don't know what the mechanics are of a paradigm shift, and so I started to research. And as I was researching, you know, ran into Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Kuhn wrote a book in 1962, and it was about this notion of the mechanics of a paradigm shift. The book was called Scientific, sorry, The Structure of Scientific Revolution. And if you imagine, you know, this process, it really was saying that there is a mechanism, there is kind of a natural process that we go through.
And so you look at this process, you know, it's listed in the book, it describes some of the mechanics, and it gave us essentially a framework for how we can look at a paradigm shift. Well, the model itself was named after Thomas Kuhn, and it's called the Kuhn Cycle, and it started with this concept that there is normal science. And I'll refer to this notion of things that are normal, and I think we're living in a normal science around identity management. But we have a few things. The model is starting to see some anomalies.
You consider decentralized identity, you consider verified credentials, you consider agentic AI, you consider non-human identity. You can try to make them fit into the current model, and so you can try to fit it into normal science, but there's enough anomalistic behavior, there's enough characteristics.
We heard, you know, agentic AI, is it a machine or is it a program, types of things. Well, that anomalistic behavior then starts to create a crisis, and that crisis is really where the whole industry, essentially the foundation of the building blocks, are changing. And so once you get through your crisis, and I think, you know, we can call it our industry's identity crisis, that crisis is going to allow us to look at new approaches. It's going to allow us to rethink how to approach the different problems.
And it's that change in the approach, that paradigm shift that I'd like to talk about today. So once we're done with the model, the revolution, we actually go back to a normal science. That normal science becomes the mainstream. We live within it until we see some of the anomalies.
Well, I think we've all experienced big paradigm shifts, either as kind of part of the community of humans and the reality of living in this world. You know, we've come all the way from, you know, believing that the world or the earth or the sun revolved around the earth, there we go, or else we've moved to where now we have a heliocentric organization where the earth actually rotates around the sun. You also look in the digital economy or the identity business, and we've moved into the cloud, big paradigm shift from on-premise. We've actually started to adopt mobile platforms.
Again, big shift to where now we have devices and it really has allowed us to do many different things. We've also introduced biometrics.
You know, the notion that we can actually get to a purely passwordless solution is key. And then generative AI, I think, is the big game changer.
Well, just this past weekend, you know, I was thinking about what is it that will relate this concept to something that we live every day. And I was listening to a very popular podcaster in the US. I'm not sure he's that common in the EU, but his name is Lex Friedman, and he had a chance to sit down with, you know, Tim Sweeney. And Tim Sweeney is the founder and developer of Epic Games, and Tim Sweeney was talking to him about, you know, I've been in the gaming industry. I love programming.
It's, you know, some of the things that he's enjoyed the most. And so then Lex said, well, what got you into 3D gaming? I knew you were kind of early on in the two-dimensional games that would got you into 3D gaming. And he said, you know, it wasn't until he saw Wolfenstein 3D. How many of you out there have played Wolfenstein 3D?
Well, Tim Sweeney said it's amazing because what it did was it changed the way we thought about it. There was a whole lot of experiments, and you consider a genetic AI or generative AI. I think there's a lot of experimentation going on, but there's no one who's really taken it to that next step, that new level.
Well, Wolfenstein 3D did that for Tim Sweeney. And he said that the game change really was where it changed the way that I looked at gaming, and it changed the way that I looked at how we interact in that kind of simulated world.
Well, so then Lex asked him one question. He said, you know, so what did you learn?
Like, what were the things that made you, you know, really evolve to see that 3D gaming was going to be the future of the game industry? And he said a few things, and I think these are relevant to the shift that the identity market is going in as well. He said first that the experience that he had was immersive.
Imagine, he said, this is the first time I turned the lights off, I turned the music up. I actually got to the point where I was scared, where I would go around the corner and it was 3D imaging, but it actually created a reality. He did say if you compare Wolfenstein 3D effects to, you know, what we have today, it's rather subpar. But imagine what that was like, you know, in 1992, roughly when it came out. He also said that it was something the market has never seen, and the market had never seen 3D gaming to that degree.
As well as then he said that I was surprised I have never experienced anything like it. And imagine a genetic AI has that potential. I think we're going to get to the point that we'll all say, I didn't even realize this was possible. And then lastly, he said that it gave me a chance to look at the world differently. And he said, because of that, it allowed me to say that's where the future is. And it allowed him to create a vision of where he thinks that 3D gaming can go.
Well, if you look at what Tim Sweeney did, is he dedicated himself and his team, there's about 20 engineers. Just checking, see if it advanced the right way. But there's about 20 engineers, and they dedicated three and a half years, they're working 80 hours straight, to build something they called the Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine was really the foundation, the framework for simulating the real world. It was actually, the game that it was supporting was a single shooter game. And it was named Unreal as well.
But at the same time, people started to hear about this engine, and people wanting to license this engine as a platform to be able to use in a lot of different things. So if you've seen the movie Barbie, or you've seen Mission Impossible, or you've seen Top Gun, if you've seen even, you know, any of the simulation that NASA puts out, you know, you see some of the videos around, you know, different electric car companies giving you a way to simulate use. You look at the simulation for F1 drivers, they're all using an engine like the Unreal Engine to be able to support that.
Well, if you look at the building blocks, one thing that Tim Sweeney did is he had a vision for how do you actually create a platform and an engine to simulate the real world, versus just develop technology for a specific game. And this platform had a few elements. And I think these are important as well, when you look at the building blocks.
First, he had animation tools that essentially made the ability to animate the real world to the common man. So you could be a business analyst, you could be a graphic artist, you could be someone, and you're actually using this set of animation tools to simulate the world.
Also, developer tools allowed for quick content creation, so that you could actually create stories, you could create worlds, you could create swords and cars and whatever you needed, as well as then he established a marketplace. And I think that marketplace gives you a chance to create that ecosystem where it isn't just one technology provider in the market, but multiple can start to contribute to build on top of this platform.
Well, the Unreal Engine, it was really good at terrain, it was really good at building kind of the worlds. But as you've seen it evolve over the years, new and more engines started to show up. Some of those engines were actually there to improve the way lighting and shadows worked. It was to improve the terrain, it was be able to give you a chance to actually create unique and imaginary worlds.
Well, consider that platform, and then what does that mean to identity? Well, in identity, you know, today, I think most of us, you know, in this industry actually hold the accounts and hold the identities of all of the account holders, essentially the customers and end users that work with our system. We all then, in an enterprise context, are actually the person that they trust, because we manage all the accounts, we manage the life cycles and virtually everything about the identities.
And so the IDP becomes really relevant, where we're starting to see some of those anomalies, we're starting to see some of the changes. And you look at just the introduction of decentralized identity, you look a lot of the initiatives around EIDAS, bringing wallets, bringing digital ID, they're changing the game. They're actually creating anomalies, because we're giving those credentials to the end users, we're giving those to others to present. So consider now the individual is becoming critical and center to the identity operation, something very different than the way we operate today.
Now, we've heard a lot about things. And, you know, again, the argument is that our agents are the machines or our machines are machines. We have things, we have unique relationships now where you've got parents who need to provide delegation approval for their children or even take care of their adults. And so the kind of relationships that need to be established have effectively said that everything now becomes a first class citizen. Imagine that I'm a user, now I'm on par with an injected AI that is doing something for me. We create a unique relationship there.
And I think this notion that the future is more than just humans, it is non-humans, but it can be virtually anything that you can establish a relationship of trust with. So I have come by my gray hair honestly, I've been in this market a few times, and I've seen a few market shifts. And if I look at, you know, the three or four shifts that have been in the market, you know, the very first was really about how do you bring identity out of the operating systems.
I originally started my career at Novell, and I was the guy who brought directory services out of NetWare to become its own independent service. And you look at how that externalizing the identity service was actually a new phase. And so a lot of the work we did was to bring directory, single sign-on, MFA, some authorization, and some access management and governance. There was a lot of, you know, emphasis on a single portfolio to address some of these needs.
The next phase, though, was to say now we've established that platform, now we need to better understand the user, better understand the network and the device they're working on. And so we started introducing things around risk. A lot of fraud technology came in to provide signals to get to know you better. As well as then, I think the next phase was fairly quick and sort of added on to it as we introduced ID verification and credentials. This has been probably the last, let's say, five to six years where we've seen that second phase accelerate.
But the belief is that there's a current phase and we're going through a paradigm shift. And it's something that at Ping we actually call the new era of verified trust. And there is a new set of building blocks. Those building blocks are what's going to allow us to make this paradigm shift in the market. It does include orchestration. That's very analogous to the identity fabric that Martin talks about. And it also includes the ability to support decentralized identity, allowing things and end users to participate and be a center of their ability to share information.
It includes deepfake protection that we'll talk a little bit more about, agentic AI and then that marketplace. So if you look at the building blocks, and I think this is the building blocks for the next phase, and I know I can't go through all of what I think is potentially ahead of us in the market. I wanted to at least talk about a few things that Ping's doing to build out the platform for enabling this new industry, this new paradigm and this shift. And that really centers around digital ID and wallets, centers around what we're doing around deepfake protection, centers around agentic AI.
I think many in this space are actually focused on these as well. And then more so is how can we then orchestrate experience across a whole lot of vendors because the belief is that not a single vendor can really address all the needs of the user and be able to do that in a lightweight self-service environment so that we can all participate in a common marketplace. So at Ping, one of the first building blocks is really around digital identity and wallets.
Hopefully you've had a chance to participate in some of the workshops as well as talk to the Ping team around what we're doing with decentralized identity and some of the wallet technology. Our primary focus is really around then credential issuance and then that notion of lifecycle. If you actually have credentials that are first class citizens that I need to manage like a lifecycle, we need to sign them. We need to actually be able to manage the change in the usage of them. We need to be able to revoke them, all those things that are necessary.
Credential verification, how do we actually cryptographically sign them and ensure that they are a verified source of credential that we can use to establish trust? And then a lot of the work we're doing is in standards. I think we're still in a very emergent phase of digital identity wallets and you've seen a lot of the conversations today around that. That's work that needs to be done. Now in the deepfake side, it's actually looking at how do you find anomaly in streaming or how do you start to detect what's happening, see if anyone has injected identity within that live stream.
And so doing quite a bit of work in that area. Others is how do we actually go beyond just the current risk as well as fraud profile and start to look at the entities and be able to essentially resolve the relationships that they have. And then last is supporting government ID as well as some of the NIST specifications to ensure that we are standardized around bill pay, around utilities, and around cards. Now with identity, there's actually two things that we're doing in the building block. The first is it's just how do you provide identity for agents?
The last conversation was really well, Enrique and team at Saviant was talking about that notion that machines and agentic AI needs to be treated like an identity itself. And so a lot of the work we're doing is just to provide that ability to manage an agentic AI as if it is a user and give it that first class citizen status. And that involves everything from just detecting is it a friend or a foe?
Be able to give them onboarding as well as register in a self-service fashion, be able to manage that life cycle, again, determine how long that it's useful, if it changes or we need to essentially revoke its access or its role, as well as then just simply managing authentication and authorization and govern it and monitor it accordingly. Now the next side of agentic AI is then now what can we do that's fun? And I think this is probably the biggest game changer.
I call this the Wolfenstein 3D opportunity, because if you look at it, agentic AI, you spend some time talking about what the potential might be, and it really is game changing. It's going to evolve where we go, but to do that, we need that framework. We need that foundation and that platform to work from. King introduced an initiative we call Helix, now you can read about, and it's really centered around a few things.
It's being able to provide a workflow so that you can manage the life cycle of that agent that's been created and be able to manage it through its creation, its testing, its simulation and deployment. We're also working on providing low-code, no-code so that building an agentic AI that has identity focus is not just something that the programmers can do, but people that are in the business be able to think through that, it's available to them.
Developer-friendly is simply just providing the tools and the capabilities so that it's not just Ping building out identity services for our organizations, but we as a community can build on top of that platform. Privacy and safety, I think we've heard a lot about at this conference, as well as being able to consume anywhere. Something that's unique, I think, about Ping is that we still do dedicate quite a bit of our investment in supporting on-premise, hybrid and in-the-cloud services.
And then last is future-ready and just making sure that as we build out capabilities and technologies, it's supportive of MCPs and the A2A protocols that we have today. Now, last thing from a building block, and again, there's probably many more that we could talk about, but the building block is really around experience orchestration.
And I've heard the word democratizing services a few times this week, and it is this notion that if I can democratize all the APIs, and then I can look at what is the best user experience for the user types that are coming in and emerging in the digital economy, I can actually create unique journeys. One of my favorite experiences was actually with one of our airline customers, and I remember sitting down in their kickoff, and I paused and I said, did you just say 45 unique roles that you have to support unique workflows and authentication mechanisms?
And they said, yeah, consider that I'm at the airport, and I've got agents that need their own authentication. They need to be on an iPad to be able to roam around. I've got people on the tarmac that have gloves on because it's cold, and they're working off a secure shared workstation, and I've got pilots in the cockpit that are disconnected working on their phone.
And so when you consider that you have an orchestration that allows you that flexibility to work across multiple different providers, as well as then create unique experience, that orchestration, again, starts to bridge the ability for us to provide that identity fabric and provide these unique experiences. Some other things that are big game-changers is this notion of pre-built integrations.
Now, if you have thousands of pre-built integrations, it takes that deployment time from six months to six weeks, which is a big game-changer. And then last is just looking at when you provide out-of-the-box integrations, you can start to then very quickly onboard and then make decisions to change out. You have one customer that actually had about 32 different identity verification vendors that they were using to support the globe. And during that, they found that one of the processes wasn't working like they wanted it to.
They did some A-B testing with a new provider that worked really well, tested well, and so they were able to swap that out in less than two weeks. So, again, orchestrate the world with pre-integrated solution makes a big difference. And so last thing before my time is over, and I've been thinking about this notion of change, and I would encourage all of us as we think through this to embrace it, to be part of it. And I found a quote from a book that's, you know, Italia Grande is a writer, he's a producer, a public, well, he's a businessman as well as a politician in the U.K.
And he writes a lot about change, and he made this quote, which is, life's true wonders unfold when we dare to shift our minds and embrace the transformative dance of paradigm change. And so I would encourage all of us, embrace the dance, let's enjoy the show, and thank you. I think I'm done. I used every bit of time, sorry. I don't know whether it's an indication of the fact that your presentation was eloquent and comprehensive, or whether the audience is just really passive. We don't have any questions from them.
But I wanted to know, are there any specific industries or use cases where these next gen identity paradigms are gaining traction faster than others? Yeah, it's a great question. And where we see traction in, you know, in the United States, we actually call it frontline workers, as well as knowledge workers, I think in the U.S.,
the EU, I hear more around blue collar, white collar. And the need for that group to authenticate themselves, to be able to actually, you know, support privacy, to have unique authentication types. I'm seeing that primarily in, you know, that consider it contractor, but it actually that distinction of frontline versus knowledge worker.
Great, really interesting. Everyone, more on your song.
Thank you, guys. Thank you.
