Humans are no longer alone online. Organizations need to know who is really in front of them
6 September, 2026
Special project | The new doctrine of defence: Guy Tytunovich of CHEQ explains why the old identity model is broken, and how to protect an organization in a world of humans, bots and AI agents
How do you defend an organization in the AI era? In a special TechTime series, senior leaders from the cyber industry set out the new threats for CEOs and CISOs – and the defensive approach now required.
Guy Tytunovich, founder and CEO of CHEQ
The entire world of identity was built on a single foundational assumption: that on the other side of the interaction is a human being. Usernames, passwords, and two-factor authentication were all designed to verify that a person is who they claim to be. That assumption is collapsing before our eyes.
We are entering an era in which a vast share of digital interactions will be carried out by AI agents acting on behalf of humans – searching, comparing prices, filling in forms, and even making purchases. The implication is that organizations need to learn not just who is in front of them, but what is in front of them.
“Who are you?” is no longer enough
Identity management has to change at its root. Instead of asking only “who are you?”, it needs to answer three questions in real time: is the entity in front of me a human, a bot, or an AI agent; on whose behalf is it acting; and what is its intent?
Agents themselves also need an identity and permissions model, with a clear chain of delegation: who dispatched them, what they are allowed to do, and what reputation they have built up over time.
An organization that can’t tell the difference between a legitimate agent buying on behalf of a real customer and a hostile bot impersonating one will lose twice: the customer, and the security battle.
The threat is at the front door
Security teams today know very well what is happening inside the corporate network, but they are almost blind to what is happening on the digital front line – on websites, in apps, in forms and in APIs.
Think about a bank robbery: the robber comes in through the branch, the place where the money meets the general public. He doesn’t head for the corporate offices of the company that owns the bank. An organization’s digital branch is its website and its app — and that is where many of the new threats operate.
The method of detection has to change too. An attack generated using AI can be polymorphic — every instance of it looks different. So we need to move from detection based only on signatures and rules to detection of behavior and intent.
And when the attacker is autonomous, the response also has to arrive at machine speed. A model in which a human analyst approves every action simply doesn’t survive the pace of events. The SOC of the coming years will run more autonomous defensive agents, and the analyst will shift gradually from being the person putting out fires to the person managing the system.
The danger: a reality that doesn’t exist
The threat that, in my view, gets talked about far too little is actually data contamination. Not one big attack, but a quiet flooding of the internet with synthetic entities.
Armies of bots and agents can open accounts, fill in forms and generate leads, clicks and engagement that look entirely human. The result is that the CRM fills up with people who don’t exist, the analytics describe an audience that doesn’t exist, and business decisions get made on the basis of a fabricated reality. Worse still, the organization’s own AI may end up training on data that was itself created by another AI.
The more organizations open the door to legitimate agents acting on behalf of customers, the greater the incentive for attackers to impersonate precisely those agents.
What should you do tomorrow morning?
If I were stepping into the CISO role tomorrow at a company with 5,000 employees, then before budgets and tools I would map the organization’s digital front door: websites, apps, forms and APIs.
I would ask a simple question: how much of the traffic there is human, how much is automated, and how much of it is already coming from AI agents.
You can’t protect what you can’t see. In the new world, organizations will have to treat non-human entities as full citizens of the identity system too — with permissions, accountability, and the ability to know who sent them and what they are allowed to do.
The next stage is already visible on the horizon: agent authentication. Just as SSL became a standard without which a browser won’t trust a website, we will reach a world in which a business can’t trust an agent without knowing who it is and on whose behalf it is acting.
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