Publicis Sapient and Ping Identity Join Forces to Modernise Enterprise Identity With Agentic AI
Publicis Sapient and Ping Identity have announced a global collaboration aimed at accelerating enterprise identity modernisation and helping organisations manage the growing number of AI agents operating within business environments.
The partnership brings together Ping Identity’s identity and trust technologies, including access controls, with Publicis Sapient’s enterprise implementation expertise and its AI-powered software development and modernisation platform, Sapient Slingshot. The companies plan to use agentic AI to automate key stages of identity transformation, including the assessment of legacy environments, configuration, integration and testing of modern identity services.
The collaboration also addresses the emerging security challenges associated with enterprise AI adoption. As organisations introduce AI agents capable of interacting with applications, tools and business data, they need mechanisms to establish individual agent identities, define access permissions and enforce consistent security policies.
For large enterprises, replacing or upgrading identity infrastructure is often complicated by legacy technologies, interconnected applications and operational dependencies. The companies intend to use AI to simplify these processes while incorporating identity governance into the deployment and operation of AI agents.
Sapient Slingshot is central to the proposed approach. The platform uses an enterprise context graph and specialised AI agents to support software development and modernisation across the software development lifecycle. By analysing business logic, application dependencies and technical requirements, the platform is designed to streamline the design, configuration, integration and testing of identity services.
The collaboration will focus on three areas. The first involves accelerating identity modernisation by using AI to assess existing identity integrations, application dependencies and access journeys, helping enterprises develop and execute transformation strategies.
The second focuses on simplifying implementation at scale through reusable identity capabilities and enterprise-specific context. This approach is intended to automate parts of configuration, integration and testing, reducing manual work and improving consistency across applications.
The third involves embedding quality assurance and governance throughout implementation. AI-assisted testing and validation, supported by specialist oversight and human approval for critical decisions, will help maintain the security and reliability of identity services.
Beyond conventional identity modernisation, the companies are also looking to address the governance requirements of agentic AI. Ping Identity’s programmable identity and access controls can assign individual identities to AI agents and govern their access to enterprise resources, including tools and data exposed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Sapient Slingshot is expected to support the automation and orchestration of agent onboarding and configuration. This would help enterprises apply identity and access policies consistently across growing agent deployments while reducing repetitive manual setup. Publicis Sapient’s engineering and implementation capabilities will support integration into complex enterprise environments.
The collaboration builds on previous work between the two companies for The AA, where they helped modernise the organisation’s identity platform. The project involved migrating 4.7 million users and 1.5 million active tokens to a modern cloud identity solution without downtime, improving reliability and scalability while reducing complexity.
“Modernizing enterprise identity isn’t simply about replacing technology. It’s about understanding how an organization operates and using that context to build what comes next,” said Pinak Kiran Vedalankar, Group Vice President, Technology at Publicis Sapient. “By combining the enterprise context and automation capabilities of Sapient Slingshot with Ping Identity’s technology, we aim to help clients accelerate identity modernization, 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.”
“AI agents are quickly becoming a new class of digital identity inside the enterprise, and organizations 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 modernize the identity foundation they rely on today while putting the controls in place to support the secure adoption of agentic AI at scale.”
