Amit Sinha, CEO of DigiCert at RSAC

We closed the most successful fiscal year in DigiCert history on January 31st this year. 102% of projected plans. We're on track to be a billion in annual recurring revenue with a very attractive growth plus profitability greater than 60% profile. So very remarkable, really proud of the team. And you know, the PKI industry is going through a renaissance, and we're leading the wave.

DigiCert is the global leader in digital trust. When you talk about AI, our customers are asking us about three things, and I'll break that down. The first one is content trust. Like, how do I know that this video from NYC is legit? Has it been edited? So what's the content provenance there? If I get an accident image at Geico, do I know that it's been doctored for an insurance fraud claim? So how do I trust content? We know how to trust documents. We know how to trust software with AI. How do I trust content? That's one area. The second area for AI is, you know, everyone is a software company. I go to Hugging Face. There are 1.5 million AI models. I put one of them in my CI/CD pipeline. How do I know this is trusted? It doesn't have a backdoor. So our customers are asking us for trustworthy software supply chains with AI. And the third area, which is a hot topic at RSA this year, is agentic AI trust. Pretty soon I'll have half a dozen agents working for me. One to be on Zoom, one to approve expense reports. How do I authorize those agents? How do I have a kill switch? If I don't like what they are doing, can I revoke it? These are all patterns that we have solved in the industry with machine identity, with software identities, and it's time to bring this paradigm to AI agents.

The bad actors have AI tools. You can only combat AI with AI, right? So we use a lot of AI within our own software to do better validation, to enable smarter automation so you can react faster. And that's the only way. You can't have humans in the loop. So a huge theme for our customers as we talk about PKI modernization is that automation is no longer an option. You need a platform that can manage millions of machine identities. Industry standards are changing where now you have to rotate some of these things every 47 days instead of once a year. So think about a million identities that need to be managed and rotated very frequently, every six weeks. You need a modern system that can automate all that for you, and that's what DigiCert One does, and we're really, really good at that.

All the CEOs of hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they've all announced their faster, better quantum chips. It's great because it's the next evolution of computing. It'll solve climate modeling, maybe even predict the stock market for you. But it comes with a big side effect. The side effect is it completely destroys all the digital trust infrastructure that we have today. All the authentication, encryption, privacy, all of that is based on math problems that quantum computers can break trivially. So that's the challenge. And what has happened as a result of this, NIST and other standards bodies working with DigiCert, we've announced quantum-safe cryptography. These are based on new classes of math problems that even quantum computers cannot crack. Those standards are available. DigiCert One supports all of those standards. And we're working with customers as they modernize their digital trust fabric to go through what I would call a once-in-a-30-year upgrade cycle. This touches everything: software, all machines, hyperscalers. Everything is based on these math problems that quantum computers will basically make trivially crackable, so you need to upgrade.

In the near-term, machine identities are exploding. We routinely talk to customers who have millions of machine identities. Now, couple that with AI agents. We've solved the human identity problem. We need to make sure machine identities are manageable. And those identities are backed by algorithms that quantum computers crack. So these are sustained tailwinds that DigiCert has to grow our business and enable customers with a modern PKI and DNS platform that gives them automation, that gives them crypto agility. This is something you're going to see a lot of sustained momentum for the next 5 to 10 years.