Ignition on AI: why visibility matters in the age of AI agents?
The Ignition on AI video podcast series continues, helping our partners and their customers navigate the opportunities and challenges presented by artificial intelligence (AI).
In our latest episode, Ignition Technology’s Chief Strategy Officer, Sean Remnant, is joined by Raghu Nandakumara, Vice President of Industry Strategy at Illumio, to explore how AI agents are reshaping the cybersecurity landscape and what organisations must do to stay in control.
The question facing security leaders everywhere is no longer whether AI will transform their organisation, but how they can stay in control of this growing community of machine identities. They should be asking themselves whether they can see, verify and control the permissions of the growing number of agents being released across their systems.
Start with visibility
Raghu explains that customers and partners consistently ask Illumio three key questions:
- What are software vendors doing to protect themselves against developments in frontier AI models and AI-enabled attacks?
- How are vendors using AI to improve their security solutions?
- How can security technologies help organisations manage the risks associated with AI adoption?
These questions all point to one common challenge: visibility.
Throughout the discussion, Sean and Raghu emphasise a fundamental cybersecurity principle: if you can’t see something, you can’t control it.
AI is creating new visibility challenges because organisations are not always certain where data is processed, stored or shared once it enters a model or application. At the same time, the emergence of AI agents and autonomous systems make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between human activity and machine-driven actions.
For many organisations, this creates a significant security blind spot. As the unseen workforce grows, security teams need a comprehensive understanding of what exists within their environment, how systems interact with each other and who or what is accessing critical systems and data resources. Visibility is no longer simply an operational requirement. In the age of AI, it’s becoming a business necessity.
In this episode, Raghu explains how Illumio’s breach containment platform helps address this challenge through micro segmentation and observability. Providing organisations with the insights needed to better understand and secure their environments, while ensuring they have complete visibility of the assets within them and how they interact, whether that’s a server, an endpoint or an AI agent.
Prevention isn’t enough, containment must be a focus
The speed at which vulnerabilities can be discovered and exploited has increased dramatically. What once took days or weeks can now happen in minutes or even seconds. AI is helping defenders improve efficiency, but it is also enabling attackers to operate with greater speed, scale and persistence.
Raghu highlights the growing concern around frontier AI models being used to identify and chain together vulnerabilities. Many known vulnerabilities remain unpatched, creating opportunities for attackers to automate exploitation paths and accelerate the attack lifecycle.
This means organisations cannot rely solely on prevention. Instead, security strategies must evolve to assume compromise and focus on minimising impact when an attack occurs. To strengthen resilience CISOs must consider the best software and methods to contain attackers quickly and avoid them moving freely throughout an environment after gaining access.
“Organisations need to boost cyber resilience through being able to contain the impact of inevitable cyber-attacks.”
For Illumio, that containment strategy is delivered through micro-segmentation, limiting lateral movement and helping organisations stop breaches from becoming business-wide incidents.
Explore the full conversation
The rise of AI agents is transforming cybersecurity at a pace many organisations are struggling to match. As the unseen workforce grows, visibility, identity governance and containment are becoming essential pillars of cyber resilience. Organisations must ensure they can see, verify and control every interaction across their environment.
Watch the full episode of Ignition on AI, to hear more about the rise of autonomous AI agents, the changing threat landscape and how organisations can stay secure, compliant and in control.
Subscribe to the Ignition Technology YouTube channel to catch future episodes of Ignition on AI.
