Firms need better understanding of AI agents: WSO2 CEO Harry Ault

WSO2 CEO Harry Ault says enterprises must focus on AI agent behaviour, strengthen governance and adopt open-source standards to address emerging security and operational risks

Enterprises will need to have a better understanding of how artificial intelligence (AI)-powered agents behave and interact with all systems, rather than focusing only on whether the right agents have access to these networks, US-based system software company WSO2’s chief executive officer (CEO) Harry Ault has said. 

WSO2 is a US-headquartered open source software company founded in 2005. It works on software system integration, user identity and access security for enterprises. 

Though AI-powered agents have been used for quite some time, most were used in deterministic systems, where security and governance are baked into the networks, leaving very little room for agents to perform tasks outside their mandate, Ault said in a virtual interview. 

 

“As things move to generative AI, you move into a more probabilistic scenario where you don't know what the outcomes are going to be. That is really hard for production-level apps, and it's a transition every enterprise is going through,” he said. 

To rein in such agents, companies must build custom AI control plans, their own mock gateways, and authentication services instead of picking one off the shelf, so they own the intellectual property in perpetuity, Ault said. 

He took over as the CEO of WSO2 from founder and long-time CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana, who retired in August this year. Ault believes that going forward, all issues that occur due to AI, such as agents going rogue or a large language model showing responses that it is not designed to, will be solved by “open source and open standards”, allowing more people to work together on the same problem. 

Most revenue-generation opportunities for nearly all technology and product companies globally are coming from AI-related demand, and the trend is likely to continue in the near future, he said. 

“The question, when you think about growth, is, how do you cater to solving all those problems that exist in AI. We then talk to companies about their budgets and try to offer them solutions around it,” Ault said. 

In countries and regions such as the US and India, being AI-first has become the norm for all companies, he said, adding that in a country like India, the scale and value of what technology can do is unlikely in any other region. 

The company, which has around 950 customers in 92 countries worldwide, also works with several large government institutions, regulators, and financial institutions in India. 

There has also been a strong emergence of founder-led product companies in India with the improvement in generative AI technology, which presents companies such as WSO2 with a lot of options for either acquiring some of them or merging them with the parent company, he said.