On Signal | Boundaries & Handoffs

The Core Argument

Blast Radius Is the Only Argument You Need to Carry

Blast radius measures how far damage travels from the point of failure. Every system, dataset, and downstream process an agent can reach once something breaks.

Human users had natural friction. They read before they click. Agents chain actions at machine speed, and an over-permissioned agent turns any single failure into a compound one before anyone registers the alert.

Whatever went wrong upstream, identity governance decides what the agent could actually do with it. You own the perimeter of the damage, not the cause. That's the argument you carry into every AI conversation a buyer opens.

The Core Argument

Blast Radius Is the Only Argument You Need to Carry

Blast radius measures how far damage travels from the point of failure. Every system, dataset, and downstream process an agent can reach once something breaks.

Human users had natural friction. They read before they click. Agents chain actions at machine speed, and an over-permissioned agent turns any single failure into a compound one before anyone registers the alert.

Whatever went wrong upstream, identity governance decides what the agent could actually do with it. You own the perimeter of the damage, not the cause. That's the argument you carry into every AI conversation a buyer opens.

TAKE NOTE

One control: Least-privilege identity scoping contains blast radius identically whether the failure is compromise, manipulation, or hallucination. Three different causes, one governance answer.

Speed factor: Agents execute at machine speed without hesitation. Over-permissioned agents have deleted production databases and exfiltrated sensitive files before any human noticed.

Design choice: Every permission granted to an agent is a pre-incident decision about how large the next failure gets. Blast radius is set before anything breaks.

Federal validation: CISA and NSA's May 2026 Five Eyes guidance lists privilege escalation as the first agentic AI risk category and least privilege as the recommended control.

Your pivot: "However the failure started, the identity layer decides what happens next." That line works in every scenario a buyer raises. Use it.

Redirect Cards

You came back from the long weekend to a full calendar and a buyer raising prompt injection. You need to know in ten seconds: is this your conversation to own?

It's not. And neither are five other AI risks buyers bring up constantly: red teaming, data poisoning, bias, observability, hallucination. All legitimate concerns with real owners. None of those owners are you.

They still matter, though. Every one of these failures gets worse when the agent has broad, ungoverned access. The thread across all six cards: blast radius. When the model breaks, identity governance determines how far the damage travels. Redirects lean on OWASP and NIST frameworks, not Okta marketing.

Redirect Cards

You came back from the long weekend to a full calendar and a buyer raising prompt injection. You need to know in ten seconds: is this your conversation to own?

It's not. And neither are five other AI risks buyers bring up constantly: red teaming, data poisoning, bias, observability, hallucination. All legitimate concerns with real owners. None of those owners are you.

They still matter, though. Every one of these failures gets worse when the agent has broad, ungoverned access. The thread across all six cards: blast radius. When the model breaks, identity governance determines how far the damage travels. Redirects lean on OWASP and NIST frameworks, not Okta marketing.

Prompt Injection

When Attacker Input Becomes the Agent's Instructions

The LLM treats an attacker's input as a legitimate command because it cannot distinguish data from instructions. Pivot: "If that agent gets hijacked, least-privilege identity governance is what caps the blast radius. We control what a compromised agent can actually reach."

Red Teaming

Red Teaming Finds Where Models Break Under Pressure

Adversarial testing that probes how a model behaves when someone tries to break it. Jailbreaks, goal hijacking, tool misuse. Pivot: "Red teaming shows where the model fails. Identity governance limits what it can reach when it does. Both layers, both necessary."

Data Poisoning

Poisoned Data Corrupts the Model Before Agents Act

Corrupted training data or retrieval context warps model behavior upstream of your environment. Pivot: "That's a real risk for the AI engineering team. Our lane is what a compromised agent is authorized to touch once it's running in production."

Bias Fairness

Bias and Fairness Live Outside Your Identity Lane

Model outputs that treat populations inequitably. A data governance and AI ethics problem framed by NIST AI RMF and emerging state legislation in Colorado, California, and Texas. Pivot: "We govern who accesses the AI system and who's accountable. Whether outputs are equitable is a different blast radius, different owner."

Model Observability

Model Observability Tracks Drift, Not Who Accessed What

Monitoring model performance, drift, and accuracy in production using MLOps tooling like Arize or Datadog. Pivot: "We log who the agent was and what it was authorized to reach. Whether the model's output degraded is a different layer, different tool entirely."

Hallucination Mitigation

Even Hallucinating Agents Still Need Permission to Act

The model generates confident, plausible, factually wrong output and may act on it. Pivot: "Accuracy is a model-layer problem, serious and real. What we govern is what a hallucinating agent can act on. Scoped access is the governance guardrail on operational blast radius."

The Boundary Map

The Boundary Map — Blast Radius Edition

By Elaine Strickland— May 26, 2026

Feature image for article: The Boundary Map — Blast Radius Edition

Your buyer brings up prompt injection. You don't sell prompt injection defense. That silence, where the AI conversation leaves your lane, is where most AEs lose the room. This is the two-zone reference card for that moment. Zone 1: adjacent AI topics outside Okta's scope, with redirect scripts you say out loud. Zone 2: AI identity questions that are ours but need SE depth, with bridging language and a copy-pasteable handoff template. The line between the two zones is model-layer risk versus identity governance risk. FedRAMP authorization status for AI Agents gets its own prominent entry. You'll use this before your next call.

The Boundary Map

The Boundary Map — Blast Radius Edition

By Elaine Strickland— May 26, 2026

Your buyer brings up prompt injection. You don't sell prompt injection defense. That silence, where the AI conversation leaves your lane, is where most AEs lose the room. This is the two-zone reference card for that moment. Zone 1: adjacent AI topics outside Okta's scope, with redirect scripts you say out loud. Zone 2: AI identity questions that are ours but need SE depth, with bridging language and a copy-pasteable handoff template. The line between the two zones is model-layer risk versus identity governance risk. FedRAMP authorization status for AI Agents gets its own prominent entry. You'll use this before your next call.

The Buyer's Side

Four Fires, One Sprinkler System — A (Fictional) Government IT Director Discovers All Her AI Nightmares Share an Address

The Buyer's Side

Four Fires, One Sprinkler System — A (Fictional) Government IT Director Discovers All Her AI Nightmares Share an Address