08/27/2026
The best part of an executive roundtable is the part nobody prepared.
We spent an afternoon in Kuala Lumpur with a room of security leaders, talking about identity in the age of autonomous systems. HashiCorp, an IBM company, set the table. The room did the rest.
Alim Ul Karim, Chief Software Architect at RISEUP ASIA LLC, sat in on the session.
What stood out was not the slideware. It was the pushback. Someone asked how you revoke an agent's access at 3am when the agent is the one making the calls. Someone else asked who owns a machine identity when the team that created it has moved on. Nobody reached for a vendor answer. They reached for what they had actually lived through.
Thanks to Shaibal Saha, Jerome Walter, and Darvin Kurniawan for framing the discussion and then getting out of its way. A good moderator makes the room smarter than the deck.
Here is what we took back to our own engineering practice. Agentic systems do not remove the need for senior judgment. They raise it. Every non human identity you create is a decision someone has to be accountable for later. Tooling can enforce that decision. It cannot make it for you.
Which is the same thing we tell every client hiring an engineer. Buy the judgment. The tools follow.
If you are building AI systems and want engineers who think about the 3am question before it happens, talk to RISEUP ASIA LLC.
