The Enterprise AI Show

Brandon interviews Amy Blackshaw, Senior Vice President of Identity Marketing at Palo Alto Networks, about identity security in the age of AI agents. Blackshaw, who spent four years leading product marketing at CyberArk before Palo Alto Networks acquired it in February 2026, explains how identity management evolved from an IT operations task into a security discipline, and why identities now need to be protected across their full lifecycle. She walks through the three segments of identity security (access management, privileged access management, and identity governance), argues that human-driven quarterly access reviews are painful and error-prone, and says vendors like Palo Alto Networks are pulling governance into the identity security platform and using AI-driven roles to pre-approve most access.

Blackshaw describes how frontier AI models change the attack landscape, with the cost of entry dropping toward zero and attackers moving at machine speed. She cites Unit 42 figures on how fast intrusions reach data exfiltration, an initial access time of about 25 minutes, and a recent investigation in which the full attack took under 10 hours. Her answer is control alongside detection and response: zero standing privileges and just-in-time access, so an attacker who steals a credential reaches a dead end. She and Brandon discuss why the most boring attacks, like a weak password and no second factor, are often the most effective, and why attackers often succeed with hard-coded machine credentials.

On agents, Blackshaw says an agent is a machine identity with human-like traits: it can reason, decide, and escalate its own privileges, and you can't MFA it. She argues agents should be first-class identities with least privilege, just-in-time access, lifecycle governance, and a gateway for policy. For human-in-the-loop agents, the person is the anchor and must approve the moments that matter, with guardrails against consent fatigue. For autonomous agents, policy is the anchor, with tightly set permissions, behavior monitoring, and a kill switch. Brandon and Blackshaw also cover how to apply zero standing privilege for admins, developers, and agents without slowing developers down, and why policy and context (time, location, and usual behavior) should decide access. They close on who owns identity, which now rolls up through the CISO and increasingly reaches the CIO and CEO, why identity and security operations teams need to share data, and Blackshaw's case for platformization in a fragmented security market.

SHOW: 1071
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1071 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/CcaFoJRu0YM

SHOW SPONSORS:
NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off
Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks 

SHOW LINKS
Pathways to Identity Security Success
SC World: Palo Alto Networks launches Idira
IdentitySecOps: The Closed-Loop Model for AI-Speed Defense
Unify Identity and Security Operations to Stop AI Attacks (ebook)
Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense
Frontier AI and Identity Security in Financial Services (Q&A)
Cortex XSIAM
Palo Alto Networks Idira
Prisma AIRS
Amy Blackshaw: You Do Not Have Three Years
2026 Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report

GUEST BIO

Amy Blackshaw is Senior Vice President of Identity Marketing at Palo Alto Networks, where she leads marketing for the identity business unit under the Idira brand. She has spent almost 20 years in cybersecurity, most of it in product marketing at large vendors, including four years leading product marketing at CyberArk, the pioneer of privileged access management, which Palo Alto Networks acquired in February 2026. [PLACEHOLDER: add any additional bio details]

Contact Amy Blackshaw:
Amy Blackshaw on LinkedIn

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Brandon interviews Dominic Williams, founder, president, and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, about the Internet Computer and why he set out to build a new back-end compute stack. Williams traces his path from building the kids' MMO Fight My Monster, one of the first serious production users of Cassandra, to decentralized networks and the founding of DFINITY in 2016. He explains the thesis behind the Internet Computer: a stack of software running down to the silicon can never be fully secured, so he wanted a cloud created by a network protocol, where software is tamper-proof, always on, and secure by default without firewalls, patches, or security and sysadmin teams.

Williams walks through how it works. Code compiles to WebAssembly and runs in persistent memory, replicated across independent nodes using Byzantine fault tolerance, so there is no database or file system to connect to, and a misbehaving node, even a "Dr. Evil" one, cannot corrupt the result. Brandon presses on data protection, and Williams points to hardware encapsulation such as AMD SEV-SNP and the ability to choose trusted node providers. He then describes cloud engines, which let an enterprise pick nodes from a marketplace (hyperscalers, independent data centers, or on-prem), reconfigure them without downtime, and avoid vendor lock-in, with payment handled behind the scenes so it looks like a conventional cloud.

On adoption, Williams says data sovereignty is a major driver, citing the U.S. CLOUD Act and governments, such as Pakistan, that want infrastructure they control and can inspect as open source. He describes Caffeine, which builds apps on the Internet Computer from a chat prompt, and Open SaaS, a suite meant to replace siloed SaaS tools with a single AI-aware system. To get started, he recommends pasting the prompt from the skills site into a coding assistant and having it write the back end in Motoko, a language designed for AI agents that guards against data loss when upgrading apps in production. Cloud engine coupons are expected to open up soon.

SHOW: 1070
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1070 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/-H4KS5AMKI8

SHOW SPONSORS:
Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks 
NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off

SHOW LINKS
DFINITY Foundation
Internet Computer
OpenCloud (cloud engines)
Internet Computer Skills: Get Started
DFINITY Unveils Open SaaS Vision for AI-Powered Business Software
Caffeine
Motoko programming language
WebAssembly
Apache Cassandra
LinkedIn: thedwilliams
Twitter/X: @dominic_w

GUEST BIO

Dominic Williams is the founder, president, and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, the Zurich-based non-profit behind the Internet Computer, which he began developing in 2015 and launched in 2021. A longtime engineer-entrepreneur focused on distributed systems, he previously founded the MMO game Fight My Monster and served as president and CTO of the Palo Alto incubator String Labs.

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Brandon interviews Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, about his 2013 book *The New Kingmakers* and his recent follow-up, "Agents: The new, New Kingmakers." O'Grady explains that the original thesis was simple: developers had gone from an afterthought in technology purchasing to the group whose choices determined what got used, driven first by open source (the LAMP stack, Linux) and then by cloud services like S3 and EC2 that removed the need to ask for budget. The two discuss why Sun was disrupted from every direction while Oracle and Cisco endured, with O'Grady noting that databases are the stickiest, highest-risk asset in the stack. He recounts getting an early look at GitHub Copilot a year before ChatGPT, but says the late-2025 jump in model capability was a step change he did not foresee.

On software development, O'Grady expects a spectrum rather than a consensus on reviewing AI-written code: toy apps and disposable software may never be read by a human, while medical imaging, aviation, and defense will demand real oversight. He uses his construction background to describe the developer's shift from builder to architect, and warns that the "human in the loop" role is the weak end of the outcomes. Brandon and O'Grady examine why individual developers feel superhuman while organizations don't see the gains, with O'Grady pointing to downstream bottlenecks like the flood of PRs overwhelming open source maintainers. He cites Dr. James Bessen's bank teller research as a reminder that automation's effect on employment is hard to predict, and asks what happens if there is an order of magnitude more software in the world.

On vendors, O'Grady expects both human-facing and agent-only businesses to coexist, with the biggest growth in agents because they scale like cloud, while Brandon points to Cloudflare's rewrite of Wrangler as a model for exposing complete APIs. O'Grady cautions that giving agents the keys to the kingdom is harder than it sounds, since subtle violations (like pulling copyrighted headshots from MLB.com) are harder to foresee than deleting a database. They close with hot takes: O'Grady takes the under on a 10% chance of AI wiping out humanity, arguing the industry doesn't draw a bright enough line between digital and physical capability, and he remains skeptical of frontier model valuations and the circular investments behind them, especially as open-weight models close the gap.

SHOW: 1069
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1069 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/E6UFnW40BHQ

SHOW SPONSORS:
NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off
Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks 

SHOW LINKS

The New Kingmakers
Agents: The new, New Kingmakers
Tecosystems Blog
RedMonk
LinkedIn

GUEST BIO

Stephen O'Grady is the principal analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, a developer- and practitioner-focused industry analyst firm. He is the author of *The New Kingmakers* (2013), which argued that developers had become the most important decision-makers in technology, and writes the Tecosystems blog. 

FEEDBACK?
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Brian (@bgracely) and Brandon (@bwhichard) discuss the biggest AI news stories from the second half of September 2026.
Oracle sent a force majeure notice on a major data center build, which Brandon reads as an early signal worth tracking. If other companies follow, it would point to stress in AI infrastructure commitments, and if not, it is a one-off. Brian suggests the industry needs a "Jenga chart" of whose money is propping up whose, with the contractors who actually pour concrete at the base. On the wave of agent launches (Meta's Muse, OpenAI's dots, and OpenClaw Enterprise), they agree that giving everyone a cloud-hosted computer for their agent is a real step toward mainstream adoption. Brian says the unanswered questions are accountability when an agent errs, security controls that don't require dozens of settings, and how people decide what is important enough to keep for themselves. Brandon argues agents should step in at the moment of a task, like filling out a form, rather than needing constant delegation. They also note the move toward soft, cuddly agent branding and the lack of easy ways to share skills across people and teams. The show closes with Meta's hiring of MongoDB's CEO to lead its enterprise push, which Brandon expects to fail because consumer companies start at a deficit in enterprise.

SHOW SPONSORS:
Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks 
NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off

SHOW: 1068
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1068 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/kaNik7LxV3s
SHOW LINKS:
https://theenterpriseaishow.com/

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We review the potential Anthropic IPO, in the context of revenue trajectory, expense trajectory and planned commitments, past and future funding rounds, future expanse commitments to large datacenter projects, and the strengths and weaknesses of the business in the current and potentially future political climates in the US and around the world. 
SHOW: 1067
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The EntAIShow #1067 - The Anthropic IPO?
SHOW SPONSORS
Nasuni - Activate your data for AI and request a demo
NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off.
SHOW LINKS
Strengths:
Brand awareness of Claude with software developers
Use-Case adoption for Enterprise workers (white-collar, software, research, etc.)
Depth and experience of Anthropic Frontier Labs (Model Building, Research, etc.)
Weaknesses
CEO who frequently scares the world with his proclamations about doom
Uncertainty about alignment to US government after 2026
Increasing annual losses against revenue
Security and safety concerns (Mythos)
Future commitments and long-term financials?

FEEDBACK?
Email: show @ the enterprise ai show dot com
Bluesky: @TheEntAIShow.bsky.social
Twitter/X: @TheEntAIShow
Instagram: @TheEntAIShow
FEEDBACK?
Email: show @ the enterprise ai show dot com
Bluesky: @TheEntAIShow.bsky.social
Twitter/X: @TheEntAIShow
Instagram: @TheEntAIShow