January 2026 Summaries

Moonpig, a company focused on creating personalized keepsakes, faced the challenge of balancing customer data management with a seamless user experience in the e-commerce sector. To enhance customer loyalty and simplify the transition from browsing to purchasing, Moonpig required a Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution that could minimize login friction while securing customer data. They chose Ory for its flexibility, offering both SaaS and self-hosted deployment options, along with modern authentication tools and competitive pricing. This partnership led to significant improvements, including increased conversion rates and higher return visits, by implementing passwordless options and social logins. Ory's security-first architecture allowed Moonpig to maintain focus on their core products while ensuring robust protection of customer credentials, resulting in a close collaboration that serves as a model for other enterprises seeking to enhance user experience while managing data effectively.

Twenty-five years ago, internet video struggled due to architectural flaws, not just bandwidth issues, and today's identity systems face a similar challenge with the rise of autonomous AI agents. These agents, which require continuous authentication and authorization at machine speed, expose the limitations of traditional identity systems that were designed for occasional human logins. Existing identity infrastructures, much like early video streaming services, are centralized, stateful, and unable to handle the scale and speed required by agentic systems, leading to potential security compromises. To address this, identity systems must transition to being distributed, edge-native, and capable of handling short-lived, verifiable tokens, similar to how video streaming succeeded by rethinking its architecture. This shift is essential as agentic AI becomes the dominant workload, requiring identity systems to function as robust, scalable infrastructure rather than mere login mechanisms, enabling secure and efficient operations at scale.

Enterprises are rapidly deploying AI agents in production systems, often without established guardrails or governance policies, leading to significant security and identity management challenges. According to EMA's survey, 79% of organizations lack formal policies for AI agent governance, yet these agents are already operational, creating a pressing issue rather than a future concern. While agents are increasingly integrated into systems to enhance efficiency, their identity models often do not align with traditional frameworks, as highlighted by the 60.5% of organizations using a hybrid human/service-account management model. This mismatch can lead to expanded permissions and compromised security, especially as organizations report using multiple IAM platforms, complicating unified policy implementation. The proliferation of agent-adjacent tools, such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, further exacerbates oversight challenges, with many running on local employee endpoints where security tools lack visibility. The narrative underscores the urgency for organizations to establish explicit and enforceable identity rules for AI agents to prevent unchecked power expansion and ensure robust security and auditability.

The emergence of Agentic AI, characterized by autonomous and goal-oriented software agents capable of independent decision-making and executing multi-step tasks, is revolutionizing enterprise productivity. However, a 2025 EMA survey conducted on behalf of Ory highlights a significant security gap, as many organizations are rapidly adopting these AI agents without proper security infrastructure in place. While a majority of large and medium-sized companies have deployed AI agents, they often lack documented policies to govern them, creating vulnerabilities due to insufficient identity and access management systems. Human oversight, relied upon by 66% of organizations, is insufficient to manage these agents effectively, as their actions can outpace human monitoring capabilities. EMA suggests treating AI agents as "first-class citizens" by managing their lifecycle with rigorous identity and access controls, enforcing zero trust principles, and ensuring unified visibility for both human and agent activities. Ory addresses these challenges by providing a transparent, modular identity infrastructure solution that supports deployment flexibility and scalability, essential for managing the growing number of AI agents in enterprise environments.

Ory and HID have announced a strategic partnership to develop a FIDO2-based enterprise identity platform aimed at enhancing security through phishing-resistant authentication by integrating physical and digital access into a unified credential strategy. This collaboration combines HID's expertise in physical access solutions with Ory's large-scale identity infrastructure, managing over 2 billion identities, to address the growing demand for passwordless and secure authentication in enterprises, especially in regulated sectors like financial services. The joint platform will simplify the adoption of FIDO technologies, providing a modular approach to modernize identity management without disrupting existing systems, and is set to be released in the second quarter of 2026. This partnership seeks to lower operational costs and improve security by eliminating password vulnerabilities and supporting seamless access across various environments, thus positioning the offering as an essential component of digital transformation and zero-trust initiatives for global organizations.