I did not expect a recent conversation to veer in the direction of Shadow Men. That was Nathan Macintosh’s spin on AI agents.
Is this you or your shadow? I’m going to call it shadow man. Is your shadow man allowed to do more things than you are as a human person?
Our conversation was on Commvault’s season-2 premiere of the Ready. Or Not. podcast.
As the company noted on LinkedIn:
AI agents can act with your access, your permissions, and your authority. What could possibly go wrong?
This series brings practical security knowledge along with urgency about business resiliency to senior executives who aren’t cyber-native. And Nathan is the perfect host to lead a discussion aimed at execs wondering how to accelerate business growth safely in the agentic AI era, especially those who are alarmed and perplexed by agents’ new risks.
Since the goal of Ready. Or Not. matches Mastering Digital Identity’s exact target audience — the CEO, the C-suite, the board — I jumped at the chance to have this conversation. Nathan asks the question they’re thinking:
Why can’t somebody just do their own things online? Why does somebody have to have an agent go do them for them?
My answer: Why do we have any things in life that help make us more productive?
In a tidy 19 minutes, we covered whether organizations think they’re ready (they think they’re partly ready but most aren’t ready at all); why agents are different (a shadow man mimics a human while connecting to computer systems); and my answer to Nathan’s question about what a shadow man is allowed to do:
The idea is it can only do as much as you can do, but that’s bad enough.
Whether you think of an agent as an eager but incompetent intern or a pre-ethical toddler, the damage it can do when it acts as you can be immense. Especially if you have no way to prove it wasn’t you personally getting into trouble. What could go wrong, indeed?
Enjoy.
P.S. I think even cyber-savvy technologists will get something out of this episode — and perhaps you’ll be motivated to pass it along to leaders in your organization who need to hear it.
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