By Hannah Delaney, Marketing Director, Ignition Technology
Some of the best campaigns don’t begin with a marketing brief. They begin with a conversation.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month encourages organisations to assess whether their security strategies are keeping pace with an evolving threat landscape. This year’s theme, “Don’t Make It Easy for Them,” feels particularly relevant as AI adoption accelerates and organisations grapple with a new category of identity risk.
Earlier this year, our CSO Sean Remnant, Sales Director Simon Delamain-Blunt and I started discussing a question that kept resurfacing across the cybersecurity market: what happens when the identities organisations need to secure are no longer human?
Identity has long been an area where Ignition has deep specialist expertise. But the emergence of AI agents is reshaping the identity landscape and creating entirely new security challenges.
As organisations embrace generative and agentic AI, a new workforce is beginning to operate alongside the human one. AI agents can access systems, interact with data, execute tasks and increasingly make decisions. Yet unlike employees, they don’t have HR records, established joining processes or formal offboarding procedures, creating new challenges for identity and access management.
We called them The Unseen Workforce, and that simple question became the foundation for one of Ignition’s most ambitious integrated campaigns to date.
From a security trend to a channel conversation
The premise behind The Unseen Workforce is deliberately simple: Trust Nothing. Verify Everything.
It is a principle that closely aligns with this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month theme, “Don’t Make It Easy for Them”. As AI agents become more embedded within organisations, making it harder for attackers increasingly means understanding, governing and verifying every identity, not just the human ones.
AI brings enormous opportunities, but it is also creating a new attack surface. The campaign explores three emerging layers of AI identity risk: personal assistants, AI agents and AI infrastructure. As adoption grows, organisations need to be able to answer increasingly important questions about who and what has access to their environments.
That moves identity beyond a traditional IAM conversation and into a broader discussion about access, privilege, traceability and governance in an AI-driven world.
Ultimately, those controls support the wider requirements of governance, accountability and resilience.
That is why we believe Identity is becoming the control plane for AI.
And it is also why this shouldn’t be a conversation conducted by one cybersecurity vendor in isolation.
Nine vendors. One industry challenge.
To explore this challenge, Ignition has brought together nine cybersecurity vendors from across its portfolio, Abnormal, BeyondTrust, CrowdStrike, DigiCert, ExtraHop, Illumio, SailPoint, Sendmarc and Synack.
Together, they bring expertise spanning identity, privileged access, cloud, network and threat protection, reflecting the breadth of security disciplines needed to address AI identity risk.
Attackers don’t think in products. They think in attack paths. Your security strategy should too.
Securing AI identities requires more than a traditional identity management approach. Organisations must consider how AI agents access systems, what permissions they hold and how their activity is monitored across broader security environments. Managing these risks will require collaboration across multiple cybersecurity disciplines, from identity and privileged access management to cloud and endpoint security.
More than a campaign
We were determined that The Unseen Workforce shouldn’t become another short-lived campaign that peaks at launch and disappears a few weeks later. Instead, we’ve created an always-on thought leadership platform that can evolve alongside the market.
At its heart is original insight from our vendor community. Each participating vendor has joined Sean Remnant for a deeper thought leadership conversation exploring AI, Identity and the changing threat landscape.
Around that, we’re building a programme of expert interviews, thought leadership and practical resources designed to help partners and customers navigate the changing AI identity landscape.
The first of those playbooks has been designed specifically for our partners, giving them market insight, customer conversation starters, objection handling and practical ways to identify AI Identity opportunities. This is available to download here, with a dedicated CISO playbook will follow.
Ready to start the conversation?
The rise of AI identities is already changing the questions organisations need to ask about security, access and governance.
Download The Unseen Workforce Partner Playbook to explore the changing AI identity landscape, understand the questions your customers should be asking and access practical conversation starters to help identify new opportunities. The toolkit also includes five indicators that can help partners identify organisations where an AI identity conversation may be particularly relevant.
Or, if you’d like to explore how Ignition can help you build an AI and Identity conversation with your customers: