In this episode of Shift AI, Zohar Alon, CEO and Co-Founder of Newcore, joins host Boaz Ashkenazy live from Black Hat 2026 for a conversation on why identity, not infrastructure, is the real fault line in agentic AI.
Zohar has spent thirty years watching the same problem resurface in a new costume, from VPNs to IDPs to now agents that can act on your behalf for hours at a time. He describes a system where a single trusted identity point can unlock hundreds of connected apps, and where an AI agent chasing a vague instruction might decide, on its own, to read six months of email or start testing messages against real people to get results. What happens when you can't fully predict what the agent will try next, and the guardrails have to be built for that uncertainty rather than against it, is the question Zohar has built a company around.
This one is for CISOs, identity and access management leads, platform engineers building with autonomous agents, and founders working in enterprise security who need to think past service accounts and static permissions.
Chapters
[00:00] Welcome to Shift AI, live from Black Hat 2026
[00:25] Thirty years in cyber, from Check Point employee 55 to founder
[01:30] Founding Dome9 and convincing the world the cloud needed securing
[02:25] The identity problem that never got solved, from VPNs to modern IDPs
[04:50] Building Newcore: one identity fabric for humans and agents
[06:15] Why a single IDP becomes a single point of catastrophic risk
[07:13] Pilot school, electronics class, and Zohar's path into Check Point
[09:36] Mentoring the next generation of Israeli cyber founders
[10:45] Why an AI agent isn't a service account
[11:59] Inside an agent's "creative" pursuit of a goal
[14:10] Human-in-the-loop as protection, not friction
[16:35] The closing two words: unknown unknown
Connect with Zohar Alon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoharalon/
Company: Newcore -https://newcore.com/
Connect with Boaz Ashkenazy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boazashkenazy/
Email: info@shiftai.fm
