AI agents (MCP servers, LangChain tools, autonomous coding assistants) are becoming production workloads that SREs own, but nobody’s treating their identities, secrets, or privilege escalation paths with the same rigor as human operators. Walk through real patterns: Conjur-brokered credentials for AI agents, JIT privilege grants scoped to agent tasks, and what an incident looks like when an agent’s session token gets over-permissioned.
Zach is an AI Subject Matter Expert at Palo Alto via CyberArk, where he works at the intersection of identity security and site reliability — focusing on non-human identity governance, AI agent privilege controls, and secrets management for cloud-native workloads. Day-to-day, he builds secure credential brokering for AI agents, integrates machine identity into Kubernetes platforms using SPIFFE and Conjur, and helps organizations treat identity as a reliability problem, not just a security checkbox.
