From Roles to Intent: Rethinking Identity in the Age of AI

What happens to identity when the entity logging in isn’t a person? That’s the question at the center of this conversation between Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai, and Chandra Shirashyad, Director of Engineering at Okta.

As AI agents take on more autonomous roles inside enterprise workflows, the traditional model of identity — based on who you are and what role you hold — is giving way to something more dynamic: access based on intent, granted just in time, and revoked the moment the task is done.

Chandra and Derek cover the shift from static authentication to continuous verification, why standing permissions are incompatible with an agentic world, and what it means to treat AI agents as a new class of identity.

Chandra’s “over-eager intern” analogy is one of the most useful framings of AI risk you’ll hear. And his advice on unifying identity infrastructure before AI agents make the problem unmanageable is the kind of forward-looking take that makes this episode worth saving.