SailPoint (SAIL) CEO on Navigating A.I. Security & the "20-Year Overnight Success"

Thanks, Alex. Good to join you. Yeah, SailPoint, you know, one of those 20-year overnight successes, right? We've been around about 20 years. And an unusual story kind of went through a venture-backed stage, through a PE-backed stage, an IPO in 2017, a take-private with Thoma Bravo, the same firm that had owned us in the pre-IPO stage, and then recently re-IPO'd here in February a few months ago and just had earnings yesterday. So that's the fast company story on the landscape. We're in the security, IT security space, the enterprise security space, particularly in an area called identity security. And to make a, you know, a fairly complex technology simple, we sort of make sure that all of the right identities, which used to primarily be people like employees and non-employees like contractors and others, now non-human identities like machines and agents, you know, there's agentic AI that's out there now, that all those identities have appropriate access to the right information, the right applications and data in an enterprise. And that can get really complex with a large enterprise with literally hundreds or thousands of employees and thousands of applications, with lots of detailed entitlements inside things like Salesforce and Workday. So it's a, it's a pretty complex problem that we solve really well for large customers.

Yeah, well, we had a good, strong report yesterday, Alex, as you saw, and we're very pleased with that. I think two things. One is, as you said, we're one of those companies that gets to answer the question: is, is AI good for you or bad for you? And the answer is yes to one of those four questions, right? Like, the truth is it's going to help those of us that are in the security industry do what we do better and more effectively. It's also going to help the bad actors, you know, the criminal elements, the nation states that sometimes are now in the attack business. It's going to help them be more effective at what they do. One particular added benefit for a company like us, as you said, is that there's a new class of identities as they're thought of in the enterprise, which are these agents themselves, right? We've seen lots of press from ServiceNow and Salesforce and other very large vendors that they're going to be using more agents in their technology to make customers' lives better, to do things more effectively and more cheaply and more efficiently. That's all great from a business efficiency and effectiveness standpoint, but it tends to have a negative downside for security. People like us need to understand: what are these agents? How many of them? Where are they? What are they doing? Are they, are they doing what you expect them to be doing? There's funny-slash-not-so-funny anecdotes already out there in the marketplace, where I think Marc Benioff famously tweeted a few months ago, 'Hey, I love Microsoft Copilot. Except I've learned that some of my employees are reading my email,' right? Like sometimes these agents return data or information that they technically you weren't supposed to or shouldn't have access to. And so there's this belief that it's going to provide tremendous benefit and advantage to business, and also kind of a dark side risk of either abuse or misuse, and that could lead to unintended consequences. So that's kind of where we sit in that world of helping companies feel secure about how they can advance with this technology and do so safely.