Publicis Sapient & Ping Identity back AI identity push

Publicis Sapient and Ping Identity have formed a global collaboration on enterprise identity modernisation and AI agent governance, centred on the use of agentic AI in identity programmes.

The collaboration combines Ping Identity's identity and access technology with Publicis Sapient's engineering expertise and its Sapient Slingshot platform. The aim is to help organisations update legacy identity systems and give AI agents distinct identities with controlled access to systems and data.

Large companies often face complex identity upgrades because legacy systems span interconnected applications and support critical operations. That challenge is growing as businesses deploy more AI agents that need defined permissions and oversight.

Under the arrangement, Sapient Slingshot will automate parts of identity modernisation that have traditionally required extensive manual work. This includes analysing legacy environments and supporting the configuration, integration and testing of newer identity services.

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 access to enterprise resources, including tools and data available through Model Context Protocol.

Publicis Sapient said its platform can support the automation and orchestration of agent onboarding and configuration. The goal is to help clients apply identity and access controls consistently across large environments while reducing repetitive manual setup.

Three areas

The collaboration focuses on three areas: speeding up identity modernisation, simplifying implementation across large estates, and embedding testing and governance into deployments. Specialist oversight and human approval will remain in place for critical decisions.

Identity modernisation has become a major issue for enterprises seeking to replace older access systems without disrupting customer and workforce services. The addition of non-human identities such as AI agents has expanded the task beyond traditional employee, customer and partner access management.

An early example cited by the companies is work for The AA, 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.

Pinak Kiran Vedalankar, Group Vice President of Technology at Publicis Sapient, said the work is intended to combine technical change with operational context.

“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.”

For Ping Identity, the partnership reflects a broader shift in how enterprises approach machine-driven activity inside their systems. As AI agents take on more tasks, identity teams are being asked to treat them as accountable actors with defined access rights rather than as background automation tools.

“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.”