Shenoy then offered a perspective based on real-world developments. He said his Bronx research medical school, which has more than $250 million in research funding, is “on the brink of danger.”
Human identity is well managed. NHI is a new frontier and the stakes are high. An unchecked AI agent in the lab could become an AI agent that silently makes decisions about patient data without anyone tracking how it got there.
“AI agents are like employees, like research assistants,” he says. “Responsibility should be given to lab heads and business heads, and we don’t have that right now.”
That’s why he started working with IBM. Now, Albert Einstein is using IBM Verify and HashiCorp Vault together (Verify on the human side and Vault on the application side) to bring NHI under coordinated control before agent AI expands further across the agency.
His advice to other leaders was direct. “This is a problem we have to deal with. We have to deal with it without anyone thinking. I’m not going to wait for someone to ask me. I’m not going to wait for the regulators. This is good hygiene and what we need to do.”
To learn more, watch Bob Kalka and Tyler Lynch’s on-demand webinar, “Agentic IAM in Practice: Enforcing Least Privilege and Auditability for AI Agents.”
