What’s the BUZZ? — AI in Business Agents Need IDs: How to Authenticate & Score Agent Trust (Tim Williams)
When AI agents can self‑spawn, act at machine speed and delete their own trails, identity and trust become business-critical.
In this episode, Andreas Welsch talks with Tim Williams—an experienced practitioner who’s helped organizations commercialize AI—about the security gaps agentic AI exposes and practical ways to close them. Tim explains why traditional username/passwords and persistent tokens won't cut it, how trust for agents should be treated like a credit score rather than a binary yes/no, and why observability and transaction-level controls are essential.
Highlights you’ll get from the conversation:
- Why agents operate at a different scale and cadence than humans, and the new risks that creates.
- Real breach lessons (e.g., persistent token compromises) that show why persistent access is dangerous.
- The concept of sliding trust: using a trust score to gate actions (low-risk vs high-risk transactions).
- Short-lived, transaction-based approvals and why persistent credentials must be replaced.
- Why cryptographically verifiable, immutable identifiers (and why blockchain can help) matter for accountability.
- Practical governance: observability, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and preparing infrastructure in parallel with agent adoption.
Who this episode is for: business leaders deciding what to delegate to agents; security and identity teams rethinking access; product and platform builders designing safe workflows for autonomous systems.
If you want actionable guidance on how to let agents accelerate your business without exposing you to runaway risk, tune in and learn how to turn agent hype into reliable business outcomes.
Questions or suggestions? Send me a Text Message.
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Disclaimer: Views are the participants’ own and do not represent those of any participant’s past, present, or future employers. Participation in this event is independent of any potential business relationship (past, present, or future) between the participants or between their employers.
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