Security and user experience efforts often focus on employees and customers, but research reveals that almost 50% of users accessing corporate data are external. This massive, overlooked user base represents a significant security and productivity blind spot for most organizations.
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Unlike human attackers, AI can ingest a company's entire API surface to find and exploit combinations of access patterns that individual, siloed development teams would never notice. This makes it a powerful tool for discovering hidden security holes that arise from a lack of cross-team coordination.
Brands must view partner and supplier experiences as integral to the overall "total experience." Friction for partners, like slow system access, ultimately degrades the service and perception delivered to the end customer, making it a C-level concern, not just an IT issue.
Managing human identities is already complex, but the rise of AI agents communicating with systems will multiply this challenge exponentially. Organizations must prepare for managing thousands of "machine identities" with granular permissions, making robust identity management a critical prerequisite for the AI era.
Instead of managing individual external users, host organizations should provide partners with user-friendly tools to manage their own team's access. Partners have better "intimacy" regarding who has joined or left, allowing them to revoke access promptly and reduce risks like orphaned accounts.
Digital trust with partners requires embedding privacy considerations into their entire lifecycle, from onboarding to system access. This proactive approach builds confidence and prevents data breaches within the extended enterprise, rather than treating privacy as a reactive compliance task.
An AI agent capable of operating across all SaaS platforms holds the keys to the entire company's data. If this "super agent" is hacked, every piece of data could be leaked. The solution is to merge the agent's permissions with the human user's permissions, creating a limited and secure operational scope.
A robust identity strategy is "T-shaped." The horizontal bar represents the entire user lifecycle (pre-auth access, phishing-resistant auth, post-auth session security). The vertical bar represents deep integrations beyond SSO, including lifecycle management, risk signal sharing, and system-wide session termination.
The 48 minutes per month that users waste on login issues isn't just an annoyance; it's a direct productivity loss for the "extended enterprise." For a company with thousands of suppliers, this reclaimed time represents a significant ROI for investing in seamless, passwordless access.
The modern security paradigm must shift from solely protecting the "front door." With billions of credentials already compromised, companies must operate as if identities are breached. The focus should be on maintaining session security over time, not just authenticating at the point of access.