Security
“Machine identities already outnumber
humans by 82 to 1… yet almost every identity programme is still built around people.”
Why a box won’t fix this From a channel perspective, the rise of AI agents changes the conversation for both partners and their customers. Organisations are no longer looking solely for help selecting security technologies; they increasingly need advice on managing a new category of operational and security risk. Five years ago, a customer conversation was about which
product to buy and how many seats were needed. Today, it is about an environment that includes cloud, identity, endpoint, SIEM and AI, and one that many organisations cannot manage alone. Tat principle is equally applicable to AI agents and, as Ian Tomas, CEO of managed cybersecurity and consulting business Sapphire, an Exabeam Pinnacle Partner, explains, “Securing AI starts with visibility and implementing guardrails at speed. Ten it is vital to monitor behaviour over time because securing AI is not a ‘one and done’ measure but a continual practice.” The same logic now has to cover machines, or Agent
Behaviour Analytics (ABA), which is the logical extension of user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) that has long formed the basis of insider threat detection and mitigation. In practical terms, ABA means a number of things: being
able to name every agent, because you cannot govern what you have not identified; tracking what each one actually does, continuously and spotting the moment its behaviour drifts toward data or systems it never normally touches. The approach makes very good sense, and regulation is
heading in the same direction. The EU AI Act’s high-risk tier imposes real obligations, including human oversight and
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logging of what a system does, and it applies to any UK business whose AI output is used in the EU. You cannot evidence human oversight or keep meaningful logs of a system you are not actually watching and cannot control. None of this comes off a shelf, and very few customers want to tackle it alone.
The opportunity It is the confluence of these trends that creates an opening for channel partners. Analysts already place the UEBA market in the multi-billion-dollar bracket, with annual growth exceeding 30%. ABA extends that same opportunity to the machine workforce, and with machine identities already far outnumbering humans, the scope of what partners can help secure is expanding just as quickly. As Tomas notes, many organisations are still approaching AI
from a relatively narrow perspective, asking, “how do I leverage AI to reduce cost here” or “I need to use AI to counter threat actors’ use of AI.” In doing so, they are “potentially missing the opportunity to create better outcomes, improve their overall security posture and adopt a more ‘always on’ mode of security.” This work is also outcome-based, and after years of tool
sprawl, customers are very focused on how fast threats are caught and how much risk is removed. For the UK channel, the rise of a workforce that is no longer entirely human is an opportunity, not a threat. The British skills shortage plays straight into the hands of partners who can offer expertise as a service, and the trusted advisor relationship is far stickier than resale ever was.
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