Securing AI Agents Everywhere with Zenity’s Ben Kliger

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

I'm happy to introduce you to a new company we haven't featured here before, and their CEO and Co-founder joins us. So let me introduce you to Ben Kleger. Ben is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Zen Entity.

Joins us from New York. Hey, Ben, how are you man? Thanks for joining here on Text Drug tv.

Oh, yeah, man. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure. So, Ben, I always, you know, I've been interviewing, well, I've been doing this 10 years, but I've been in venture backed startups for 25, 30 years, mostly in biz dev and corp dev kind of activities. I always enjoy meeting co-founders because their passion for what they do, right?

They always, I've never met a successful co-founder who didn't think that in some small way, even in a small way, sometimes in a big way, what they're doing is somehow gonna change the world. Right? It's what they're doing is important.

I've never had, you have to have this, uh, you have to have this belief in order to wake up at night and, uh, you know, fight, uh, the, the tallest mountains, uh, in the world. So, yeah, of Course. Exactly, because otherwise you gotta be a little crazy to do this, right?

Yeah. After. Yeah.

So if you don't really believe in what you're doing and what you can do it, it just don't, it doesn't work. Uh, then before we get into what led you to both found Zen and what, what's sanity's about, let's hear a little about your journey, uh, how you got here today. Give us your background Course.

So, um, I'm, uh, what, uh, people like to call a cybersecurity vet. Uh, it's what I've been doing, uh, in my entire professional career. Obviously, you can, uh, hear my accent.

I'm originally from Israel. I started this journey, um, I think, uh, more than 18 years ago, um, uh, during my, uh, army service in the IDF and Unit need eight, 200, uh, worked on a cybersecurity related, uh, uh, initiatives, uh, over there. Um, did some, uh, consulting many years of, uh, product management while to starting sanity.

And most recently, and it's like, you know, uh, we started a company almost four years ago. I was with Microsoft where I was leading one of the product groups in the cloud security space. It's a product that, uh, we've incubated internally.

I was leading one of the teams there. Um, um, uh, the first, uh, one of the first cloud security products in the market. Not a lot of people know it, uh, was, uh, developed by, uh, my team at Microsoft.

It's a product now referred to as, uh, Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Um, that's, uh, that's, uh, my own, uh, personal journey. Uh, that's also where I've met Michael.

Uh, my co-founder and our CTO we're good friends. Uh, Michael is a, a vet himself as well, uh, from the same unit. Uh, but, uh, we worked together very closely at Microsoft.

Uh, Michael was there in the security CTO team in charge of, uh, innovation, uh, trying to find the new areas for Microsoft to explore. Uh, been doing a lot of stuff around the API security and IOT security. And, uh, most predominantly before we both left, we were both very focused on helping Microsoft to start thinking about what it means to secure cities and development.

Um, so that's, uh, what has gotten us, uh, to this point. Fantastic. I'm a bit of a secur cyber security vet myself.

I've been in security about 25 plus years. My background, uh, before they called it cyber, we called it InfoSec the info, correct, yeah. Information security.

Um, it's interesting, we look at what's going on with Microsoft now. It seems that it, once again, they're starting to, you know, reemphasize security maybe for all the wrong reasons, right? They've had some, some incidents, but, um, it, it's almost like a throwback to the trustworthy computing time, right?

Where everyone's going to be focused on, you know, security being job one. But you left, you said you founded IT entity about four years ago. Yeah.

So what was the passion? What drove you to you and Michael, your co-founder? What drove you guys to say, I, we, we gotta we gotta start this company.

What was the problem? What was, what drove it home For you? So it's, it's of course a great question, right?

Uh, but, uh, when you think about, um, let's call it, uh, the big impact that, uh, technology and people is doing, uh, all over the world, citizen development, the usage of, uh, GN ai, the usage of low code by, uh, what we call, uh, regular people in the enterprise, people who are not, uh, tech savvy, of course not security savvy, uh, that, uh, was clear to us that this is what the future, um, um, um, is, right? This is where people are going to build stuff on their own without waiting for developers or without waiting for, uh, it people like ourselves to come and, you know, save the day and develop, uh, the app that they need or the process that, that they need. The tools are already there.

Uh, Microsoft is of course, uh, uh, one of the largest vendors in this space. So we got to see the problem from a very intimate perspective, both internally at Microsoft, uh, back then, as well as, uh, hearing what the Microsoft, uh, some of Microsoft's largest, uh, clients were asking about. Um, um, so that aspect and, and as well with our own entrepreneurial sort of, um, um, um, you know, goal of trying to solve a very significant problem and not just a small build, a small feature company that met us to come and, uh, do this crazy thing of, uh, going after starting a whole new category in cybersecurity, which is, uh, securing, um, business productivity, right?

Securing how business, uh, uh, how uh, businesses are leveraging, uh, GNI and low code and making sure that they do it so securely. Absolutely. And, and you know, it timely, if, if nothing else, um, I should mention Vanity is spelled Z-E-N-I-T-Y, the website, is it Vanity dot what?

io and your IO spelling it a, you're spelling it exactly as, uh, as women do. Well, I, I'm cheating. I have it in my teleprompter in front of me, I'll be honest.

But, but that is how you spell it. Z-E-N-I-T-Y io. You heard what's going on with the DO io domains, right?

Of course. The, what's the backup domain? Um, um, it's as empty.

I, we have a lot of, uh, you know, uh, controls in place. So I think, uh, we'll do well. Uh, but of course, um, we have a very live and, um, uh, and active, uh, LinkedIn page as well.

Um, X security, um, um, and I invite people to, to follow what we're doing. There is another, um, uh, domain that we manage, which is more focused on, uh, let's call it a community involvement in the security research spirit. It's, uh, um, labs io, um, so, uh, also an io uh, domain, but, uh, strongly recommend taking a look at it as well, Dr Dot.

Um, so, you know, one of the big stories that we're seeing over here when it comes to AI and generative AI is this move to what's called a agentic ai. Hey, everybody, for every, for every job, there'll be an agent and everyone will have an army of agents doing all of their mundane daily tasks for them. So much so that we'll need an agent, uh, to manage the agents and maybe an agent to manage that agent.

And it's great. I mean, each one of these agents, whether they, whether they're really a full-blown agent or a sub agent or whatever you want to talk, these agents will do a ton of things for us all over the place. However, there's a security aspect, like there always is.

It's why we can't have nice things in the internet, right? There's always a security aspect to it. And the more agents we have, the more security issues we're gonna have.

Is this something identity is tackling, right? How do we, how do we secure this army of AI agents as far as the eye can see here? How are we gonna do that securely?

Of course, I think the most important thing to understand, uh, with regards to, uh, agent TKI, is that it's really going to be everyone, right? Especially when you look at, uh, um, you know, um, co America, large enterprise as well, heavily leveraging technologies from vendors like Salesforce with the agent force announcement or Microsoft copilot, um, or AWS bedrock, where it's gonna be very easy for people to just go and build their own agents or customize existing agents, right? We're talking about a ball of technology that is really taking, uh, going to take every organization, uh, by storm, right?

Um, when people are building those agents, um, uh, like, you know, as, as a security industry, as an InfoSec, uh, industry as, uh, we started, uh, started earlier, um, we put so much focus on making sure that we have controls around professional development, around coding, right? We have vulnerability scanners and suppression of, uh, environments and this privilege and rental protection and, and whatnot. There are so many technologies, technologies in the AppSec space to make sure that professional development is secure, but now we need to, to ask ourself, well, there is a whole new wave here now that is taking the world by storm of people building their own agents.

They're not gonna do so with code. They're gonna do so with a check interface, or they're gonna do so with a drag and drop capability because it's just so easy to create those agents and LLMs are, and will be more and more commoditized, right? Um, do we have practices, do we have controls in place to make sure that those people are all of a sudden building agents of agents or subagents or whatever you want, um, a type of an agent that you want to refer to that that is going to make their lives easier, that is going to automate the, the, the experiences.

Do they know to build those agents securely? Do they know to use an identity in a secure way? Do they need, do they know to how the agent has access to data on their behalf?

Do they know which actions an agent can perform? Do they know how this agent is communicating with other agents? These are all very important questions that we need as an industry to make sure that we have a focus on, to make sure that we are not only providing the means for people to be way more productive, and that's what we need to do, right?

We need to continue pushing technology, like technology is making our lives and the world better, right? Let's, let's agree on that, right? But we just need to do so responsibly and we need to have some controls and guard, bless guard rails in place, especi, especially when we're looking at corporates that have very sensitive data, right?

And that wanna make sure that when people are bid those agents, that they're not exposing the organizations to risks such as drug poisoning or such as, uh, you know, prompt injection and some other, uh, ways of, uh, uh, let's call it new attack surfaces that those new agents, uh, are exposing, uh, the respective organization. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, Ben, from my years doing venture backed startups, being an entrepreneur, co-founding, one of the things we always used to hear from venture capitalists is, you're too early, too early. Not a mature enough market yet. Not a big enough market yet.

Are we too early? Is how big is the market? When do you think this really starts kicking in?

So I think it's not a question, uh, for the security vendors to be honest. Uh, the genie is out of the bottle. Um, agents are everywhere.

AI is everywhere. Um, um, and again, we, we need to make sure that, um, we are enabling these technologies, but that we do so securely. Um, the E jet ai, um, e economy on its own is worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, just the security portion out of it, you know, usually it's between, let's say 10 to 20% of the IT spend.

It's a d big enough of a, of a market to go after, uh, right now. Um, and we're of course very proud, uh, to lead this market. We started early when we started the company.

We started, uh, as I said, almost four years ago, some people told us, no, uh, gene AI or low code in the enterprise. That's, that's not going to to be a thing, right? Um, we're very persistent.

Of course, we knew what's coming. We heard it from our clients, right? We're working very closely with some of the largest Fortune 500 organizations in the world.

Financial services, tech, pharma, huge companies that are heavily promoting these, uh, um, you know, groundbreaking technologies. So we knew that it's coming. Um, and we're very, uh, proud to be in the position that we have to make sure that organizations can continue adopting these technologies, uh, with ity securely.

I love it. io, B-E-N-I-T-Y? Correct.

All right. Ben, thank you so much for coming on Tech Truck TV today. I said it'll be 15 minutes.

It goes quick, it's quick. But, uh, have a happy Thanksgiving and best of luck with Zen entity. Do keep us posted about what's going on here.

We will. We'll, we promise, uh, to, to keep bringing, uh, interesting news. Happy Thanksgiving and happy holidays to the audience, and thanks for having me.

All right. Ben Kleger, CEO Co-founder of Zen securing AI agents everywhere here on Tech Drug tv. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be right back.