Publicis Sapient and Ping Identity partner on AI agent identity

Publicis Sapient and Ping Identity announced a global collaboration on 13 November 2026 to modernise enterprise identity systems and bring AI agents under formal identity governance. The partnership centres on agentic AI — autonomous software agents that act on systems and data — and treats those agents as accountable digital identities rather than background automation.

The deal pairs Ping Identity's identity and access management technology, the discipline of controlling who or what can reach enterprise resources, with Publicis Sapient's engineering services and its Sapient Slingshot platform. The stated aim is twofold: help large organisations update ageing identity infrastructure, and give AI agents distinct identities with controlled, auditable access to systems and data.

Why does this partnership matter now?

The timing reflects a structural shift in enterprise security. Large companies routinely struggle with identity upgrades because legacy systems span interconnected applications that support critical operations. Rip-and-replace projects carry real risk of disruption to customer and workforce services.

That challenge is growing. As businesses deploy more AI agents, those agents need defined permissions and oversight just as employees, customers and partners do. Identity modernisation, once a matter of replacing older access systems for human users, has expanded into managing non-human identities at scale.

For Ping Identity, the partnership reflects a broader change in how enterprises treat machine-driven activity inside their systems. Identity teams are increasingly asked to treat AI agents as accountable actors with defined access rights, not as invisible scripts running in the background.

"AI agents are quickly becoming a new class of digital identity inside the enterprise, and organisations need the same confidence in what an agent is and what it is allowed to do that they expect for their workforce and customers," said Alex Laurie, Go-to-Market Chief Technology Officer at Ping Identity. "Together with Publicis Sapient, we're helping enterprises modernise the identity foundation they rely on today while putting the controls in place to support the secure adoption of agentic AI at scale."

What does Sapient Slingshot actually automate?

Under the arrangement, Sapient Slingshot will automate parts of identity modernisation that have traditionally required extensive manual work. According to the announcement, that includes:

• Analysing legacy identity environments to map what exists before anything changes
• Supporting the configuration of newer identity services
• Supporting the integration of those services with existing enterprise systems
• Supporting the testing of deployments before they go live

Publicis Sapient said its platform can also support the automation and orchestration of agent onboarding and configuration. The goal, the company said, is to help clients apply identity and access controls consistently across large environments while reducing repetitive manual setup — the kind of work that has historically made identity programmes slow and expensive at enterprise scale.

The companies also plan to apply programmable identity and access controls to AI agents. Ping Identity said those controls can assign individual identities to agents and govern their access to enterprise resources, including tools and data made available through Model Context Protocol — the open standard that lets AI models connect to external tools and data sources.

What are the three focus areas?

The collaboration concentrates on three areas:

1. Speeding up identity modernisation — compressing timelines for replacing legacy access systems by automating analysis and configuration work.
2. Simplifying implementation across large estates — making it feasible to roll out consistent identity controls across sprawling, interconnected application environments.
3. Embedding testing and governance into deployments — building verification and oversight into the process rather than bolting them on afterwards.

The companies were explicit that automation has limits. Specialist oversight and human approval will remain in place for critical decisions, a position that aligns with how regulated enterprises are approaching agentic AI generally: automate the repetitive work, keep humans on the decisions that carry operational or compliance risk.

Is there proof it works?

The companies cited one early example: work for The AA, the UK motoring organisation, where they said they modernised the organisation's identity platform. The project involved migrating 4.7 million users and 1.5 million active tokens to a cloud-based identity system with no downtime.

That figure is the partnership's strongest evidence point. Migrating millions of users and active tokens — the credential objects that keep sessions alive — without interrupting service is precisely the outcome large enterprises demand from identity programmes, because those systems sit directly in the path of customer and workforce access. A migration with downtime would mean customers locked out; a migration with no downtime demonstrates that automation-assisted modernisation can be done against live infrastructure.

What did the executives say?

Pinak Kiran Vedalankar, Group Vice President of Technology at Publicis Sapient, framed the work as a combination of technical change with operational understanding. The argument is that identity modernisation fails when treated as a pure technology swap, because identity systems encode how an organisation actually operates.

"Modernising enterprise identity isn't simply about replacing technology. It's about understanding how an organisation operates and using that context to build what comes next," said Vedalankar. "By combining the enterprise context and automation capabilities of Sapient Slingshot with Ping Identity's technology, we aim to help clients accelerate identity modernisation, simplify how AI agents are onboarded and governed, and move forward with greater confidence. This is how we turn AI capability into real business outcomes."

The phrase "real business outcomes" carries the commercial logic of the deal. Publicis Sapient sells digital transformation services; Ping Identity sells identity infrastructure. Both vendors face the same customer problem from different sides: enterprises want agentic AI but lack the identity foundations to deploy it safely. A partnership that fixes the foundation and the agent layer in one programme gives both firms a route into budgets that would otherwise be split.

What happens next?

The stakes are straightforward. Enterprises deploying AI agents without identity controls have no reliable answer to the question of which agent accessed which data, when, and on whose authority — the same question identity teams have spent two decades answering for human users. As agent deployments multiply, the demand to treat every agent as a named, permissioned, auditable actor moves from best practice to baseline requirement, and vendors that can automate both legacy modernisation and agent governance are positioning for that shift.