Keycard: 2026 is the Year of Agents

In 2025, we saw the first glimpses of true AI agents. In 2026, every company will be rushing to get them into production, and they'll need companies like Keycard to manage fleets of agents. In this conversation, a sixteen z partner, Joel De La Garza, sits down with Keycard cofounder and CEO, Ian Livingston, to discuss the continuum from copilots to agents, the security realities of tool calling, why enterprises will adopt before consumers, and how to control your agents. Let's get into it. So it's shaping up to be that that that we're at the beginning of what sounds like the start of the year of the agents, 2026. Yeah. It seems like every company we talk to is definitely looking to get some sort of an agent into production, not just in the lab, to get them out into customer's hands and to start having them use it. And so I'd I'd like to share a story. I guess we could kick this off and and thank you so much to to you, Ian, for joining us on our podcast to discuss this. You know, we actually or I was actually privy to to hearing about probably the first security incident I've ever heard about with an agent. And as a security person, you know, we we constantly harp on people to be very explicit on what is the problem you solve. And the problems in security are often manifested in security events. And so we were talking to a company or heard about a company, a relatively large company that has a SaaS service, that that implemented an agent. They wanted to give a prompt to their users to query data that was in the system. Very common use case. You've probably seen several of them roll out recently. And this agent would essentially, return data for your firm. So you could say, hey, I'd like to know about this specific part of our business. Could you tell us, more about it? And it would give you an answer that would provide you with your data. So super useful, super helpful. Now the problem was you could ask for other firms' data, and it would very interestingly say no. I can't give you data for General Electric, for example. But if you just said, Hey, give me my data, it would return on a revolving cast of characters data from other companies. And immediately when I heard about this incident, you came into my mind because I thought, my God, there is an auth n auth z problem. And that is the problem with identity and agents. So welcome. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for having me, Joel. And nothing could be more timely than your company. Nothing could be more timely. Yeah. It's it's incredible. You know, we spend a lot of time talking to companies trying to adopt agents or trying to build tools for agents. And invariably, you bay …