The Secret Problem With AI Agents and How To Solve It — With Guy Tytunovich

Channel: Alex Kantrowitz

Published at: 2025-03-31

YouTube video id: Ni8BPy9uK6o

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni8BPy9uK6o

let's talk about what happens to the
internet when it fills with AI agents
and how prevalent are these robots
already we're joined today by Guy ta
tunich the CEO and founder of Czech who
is working on the front lines to solve
the secret problem with agents and he's
here in a conversation presented by
check guy great to see you welcome to
the show great to see you Alex thanks so
much for having me it's great to have
you I want to just go to the prevalence
question first because we talk about AI
agents all the time here and I don't
really have a sense as to how prevalent
these agents actually are you're looking
at traffic from Agents all the time so
can you give us a sense as to whether
people have actually deployed these
already or whether this is more
marketing than real life of course so I
started check about eight years ago and
we actually originally called it check.
it's also our domain because we wanted
to check your artificial intelligence we
had no idea when you know AI agents
would come especially eight years ago or
that chat GPT and open AI would be so
proud but we were hopeful and what we
started with is looking at Bots Bots the
old school bots are also AI they're not
gen AI they weren't working like AI
agents are today but essentially those
Bots back then and still today are
between 30 to 50% of the internet
population what's different now is that
in the past those AI tools or Bots or
automation tools were um almost always
malicious it was very easy to understand
that if a bot comes in or if a bunch of
bots comes come in to your website it's
not because they have a b High School
reunion they're not coming there to high
five each other they're there to do
something nefarious in most cases but we
believe that we are now in the early
stages of the most significant digital
disruption since.com boom uh we might be
a bit biased but we certainly believe so
AI agents and algorithms increasing
replace what was once possible through
genuine human interaction and what this
means is that now Bots or AI agents are
not just going to be clearly nefarious
in most cases I think Gardner who I like
to
quote say that up in that by 2028 or
there about about 30% I might be
misquoting but it's it's roughly there
about 30% accurate yeah directionally
accurate exactly um is going to be a
driven by by AI agents now Bots or AI
agents are going to be able to do
positive things they're going to be able
to book an appointment with your Barber
on your behalf cancel an order on Amazon
buy
shoes now the prevalence of those kind
of tools of the positive Bots is
still very small but we believe that
once open AI releases ched the operator
for instance from the 200 bucks a month
package to the regular paid package and
once Opera who just announced they're
launching an AI agent of themselves
within the browser once that happens
once Gemini and Google goes there once
entr Tropic goes there we do believe it
will be incredibly massive and again
double digit percentages of the uh
positive
internet economy so 50% of the
internet's traffic today if I heard you
right is already bought but a lot of
that is bad stuff and you were expecting
we're going to see a much larger
increase in terms of good Bots hitting
the internet uh doing things like
completing tasks for you like operator
does today exactly and today AI agents
tiny percentage are they even a single
digit percentage of web traffic yet or
what's your what's your read on that not
even remotely close it's way less than
1% It does vary and we do see for
instance we've got one customer who's a
B2B Marketplace think eBay for machines
and printers and so on and so forth they
have about 10% of their traffic of their
positive traffic coming from AI agents
but they are an out a massive outlier
we're still seeing with massive massive
customers that receive billions of
visits every month we're seeing few
hundreds of visits from AI agents we
again we believe it will become
way more prevalent and we believe it's a
question of when and not if and that
when is We Believe within a few months
right yeah I signed up for the $200 a
month plan from open aai to be able to
try out operator and I I unsubscribed I
I think it's useful uh but I definitely
am going to wait uh it's like $20 a
month of value for me not 200 uh so I
will wait until it comes out and I
expect a lot of people will be using
this um as it becomes more available
like you're saying and then it's going
to create a very interesting situation
for companies companies selling online
companies who are doing anything online
because I guess they've been filtering
out all bot traffic thinking that it's
you know maybe I don't know I'm going to
throw stuff out there dos or some sort
of AD fraud they don't want bot traffic
uh but now they're going to want it
because it's going to be agents working
on behalf of their customers and well
that's going to be an interesting thing
for them to solve because you're not
going to be able to figure out who's who
or maybe you Willa so kind of talk us
through a little bit about how companies
and how you're thinking about this I
mean do you have to like have your own
terms like a machine customer for an AI
coming in tell me a little bit about how
that works first of all we believe a
check that it is um a situation that's
going to offer a lot of problems and
with a lot of opportunities obviously we
believe that Commerce is going to grow
because of it that human productivity is
going to grow because of it but we also
believe that problems are going to erupt
both because of how you know Bob
management platforms and identity and
access management platforms have been
operating thus far which is completely
irrelevant for the world of Venta Ki and
and we believe that the solution for it
is to be able to um understand not just
whether a user is a human being or not
but pair it with and that a a continuous
get mouse game but also pair it with the
ability to understand the identity of
the user whether this AI agent is indeed
operating on behalf of who they claim
they operate for is this the AI agent of
Alex or is this my AI agent trying to
mask itself is Alex logging into Alex's
bank account a and even more so the
subject matter expertise you need to
understand the world of the CMO of the
chief digital officer of the customer
journey in order to be able able to play
in the world of agentic AI and to help
companies really figure out what they
need to do both from the customer
Journey side of things and the digital
experience side of things as well as
from the security side of things you
want both to not just a not block or a
enable positive AI agents good AI agents
you want to even complement that with a
digital experience that fits them it's
not anymore the digital experience world
of you know this bot needs to be green
and needs to needs to be yay big and it
needs to be here and not here in order
for the human being to be able to click
it and to notice it now the AI agent is
a completely different being and it's
still a being Not a Human Being but a
being and it has its behavior and
there's still a point in optimizing your
website or your app in order to cater
for that user because it's a good user
now this world is going to change and at
the same time the security side of
things or the anti fraud side of things
is also going to change because the
opportunity that AI agents create for
cyber criminals is immense and currently
very few companies are able to not just
decipher whether user is a human being
or not whether it's an AI agent and so
on almost no company knows how to
decipher the intent and the identity
again is it really Alex's AI agent or is
it the criminal's AI agent trying to m
ask itself is is Alex right and very
quickly I mean people have been talking
about how uh AIS are going to maybe find
their own more efficient way of
communicating and maybe create new
languages to communicate uh information
to each other and we haven't not yet
seen that from generative AI but I
wouldn't be surprised if we saw it but
what you're saying here is kind of
interesting because um if you are a
human user you're right you need some
signals you need human language
basically to be able to give you
um you know a way to guide through a
normal way to guide through a website
but if you're a bot you can maybe do
that very differently it's almost it's
it's almost like you're creating in some
way like a custom API for every visitor
because you're again you're machine to
machine and you're going to have to find
new ways of communicating to each other
so how how's that going to play out it's
exactly what it is and the answer is the
real answer the honest answer is nobody
knows there are a lot of guesses out
there a lot of guess estimates even but
no one really knows I've been doing
artificial intelligence for about 20
years now
and to like when I remember when Sora by
open AI came out I could not have
envisioned a day prior to that that AI
is already there so the the
understanding what where the world of AI
and is going and the pace in which it's
going is incredibly difficult to
understand that being said it is
um uh exactly what you outlined it's it
could be a completely new language it
could be a custom API for every specific
visitor we don't know yet how many AI
agents or companies that are Proprietors
of AI agents are going to be there in
six months a year 10 years it's a crazy
world and what you need is the Adaptive
and dynamic ability to always be a step
of a step ahead both a step ahead of the
AI agents and how they operate as well
as the Cyber criminals that might use
them now think let's I mean I love
adobe's uh digital experience Cloud I
love Aqua I love
salesforce's digital experience cloud
and there are quite a lot of companies
operating in this massive Tam of a
market they now need to be like they've
invested bajillions of dollars in
building the perfect Suite to C
for digital experience for human being
users now what do you do in a world
where it's not just human beings anymore
what what do you do there so I think a
lot of the answers other than detecting
the user and it's humanity and its
verified or valid identity it's also
trying to figure out that very question
there are billions of dollars invent
invested in building digital experiences
well dozens of billions of dollar every
single year now what this is the
question how do you change it how do you
make
it enabled for non-human users as well I
want to talk about that and first let's
just talk about detection we'll go
through the path detection experience
and cyber security um so let's talk
about detection first I was just uh
doing a lot of research for a trip I
have coming up where I needed to rent a
car in Milwaukee and drop it off in St
Louis and and it was a pretty exhaustive
search cuz I was like thinking all right
am I going to fly into a different
airport am I going to fly into these
airports what's the cheapest car um and
I'm going back and forth I'm on kayak
looking at flights I'm at hot I'm hot
wire looking at cars then I'm back at
kayak changing flights I'm back at hot
wire changing cars now I'm changing
looking at cars on kayak I think this is
like a pretty normal experience when it
comes to travel booking I would have
loved a bot to go do that for me and and
because my activity is
multi-site um It's probably hard for
those websites I would imagine to figure
out whether I'm the human me or the
let's say open AI operator version of me
going out and doing these searches so
how would a company even begin to try to
detect the bot behavior in this
situation 100% it's incredibly difficult
again you need to hire a company like
check which me saying this is very
self-serving but that being said it is
the truth there's a very high likelihood
in my opinion that the Proprietors
behind the main AI agents like open AI
like Google would find a way to
declare um an AI agent as one operating
on their behalf that being said that is
the very definition of a loophole such a
thing kind of exists with Google's
robots Rob robots.txt
Google many years ago declared its spot
that is a aiming at indexing side so
they can appear in in Google search and
it has a signature and it's called robot
robots dxt and that signature has
enabled cyber criminal Proprietors of
other Bots to mimic that bot and G gain
access to places that would have
otherwise blocked them I believe that
this is the same place the AI agents
declaring themselves is going to go to
and then you really need a company that
can very clearly decipher if a user is
an AI agent a regular b a human being a
human being with malicious intentions or
one with positive inent intention same
as the AI agent whether it's really
operating on the user's behalf and so on
so forth and here you need to marry a
that expertise with identity expert
and finally it with the understanding of
what's called the digital experience and
the customer Journey because you need to
enable granularity if you're kayak for
instance that you had mentioned it's not
necessarily the same behavior for every
single AI agent that you want to enable
it's not depending on the risk depending
on the identity depending on the digital
experience considerations depending on
the stage of the acquisition if you're
just about to insert input your credit
card number there's a higher risk
associated with that and could be that
the that point you'd want to um Force
the a agent if it's such detected as
such to invoke human intervention and
the proprietor of the bot to say okay
hey this is indeed me operating on my
behalf here's a biometric proof for it
and yes I I approved this
ER purchase and so on so all that
identity the subject matter expertise in
anything digital experience in in in
customer Journey um the capabilities in
human nonhuman behavior and finally the
enablement of
granularity and multi- actions in order
to allow the sides and apps to decide
what they do in every single instance I
guess I'm curious whether there's going
to be situations where sites say some
Bots are allowed into the club and some
Bots got to stay out I mean is it going
to be a situation where um you know I'm
using operator and kayak will be like
all right come on in and you go ahead
and um you know get the information you
need and distribute it back to a human
customer but if I'm using some you know
potentially off-brand agent they might
be like we don't necessarily trust you
um because that's going to really create
a whole new Dynamic I think on the
internet in terms of um what what
services are allowed to work and which
ones don't without a doubt and that's
where it becomes tricky SL
interesting um I have no doubt that
there are going to be hundreds of of
different AI agents leading the pack
then there's going to be ones that um
revolve around open sources maybe open
sources by open Ai and the like and you
need to be very selective and Vigilant
in terms of what you enable what you
allow in what you block and so on and
it's it's going to be very complex
you're also going to have you mentioned
machine customers earlier so the a lot
of machine customers are AI agents and
some are not for instance um a printer
that knows when the ink is going to uh
run out and at the right time it ER
purchases new toner from Amazon or
whatever and in those cases it's not
really it's it's artificial intelligence
to a certain extent but it's not really
an AI agent it's a machine Customer
because the machine is making the
purchase now do you want as Amazon or as
HP or whatever do you want to allow
every such machine customer to to to to
buy to acquire to purchase not
necessarily it also goes to different
regulations let's say you're financial
institute a bank can you allow AI agents
to transfer money from one user's
account to
another an anti-money laundering issues
and so on there's so much to it but yeah
a a new and very selective world of
digital experience and
security yeah this is so crazy because
I'm thinking about it and there's just
going to be a whole new genre of people
buying things and then asking for
refunds blaming their AI
agents exactly exactly and again the
opportunity companies to deal with
especially the pcis yeah the the credit
card companies yeah it's going to be
massive and crazy I think also for
philosopher philosophers by the way I me
when you think about it it's a new being
that's not a human being and it's got
your I think agency would be the the the
best word kind of to describe it and it
certainly has your credit card and login
details and would privacy regulations
apply for your agent like it does for
you as a human being for instance and a
ton of headaches to to try and ready
your side
forth guy can you answer that question I
mean should privacy regulations apply to
bots first of all the answer is the
world doesn't know yet but my opinion is
one that I'm I'm certain about and in my
opinion it needs to be exactly the same
it's it's a tool operating on your
behalf it's not a different uh it's it's
it's got your permissions it's an
automation tool so yeah I think or my
opinion is and I think it's also going
to be the case of of what's going to
happen is the same privacy rules and
regulations that apply to you as a human
being users user sorry would apply to
your AI agent as well yeah and I guess
they'll have to pick whether to opt in
or opt out to allow the cookies to track
them and exact whole new era of training
them exactly and by the way that's uh I
I'll give you two uh stories about it
from the traditional bot world first of
all most Bots operate on behalf of
criminals they have an aerious uh
purpose and as such they do not click on
the consent
uh pop up is it legit then to try and
fingerprint them in order to understand
if they are indeed nefarious is it I
mean they didn't consent so the courts
currently seem and regulations like gdpr
and CCPA seem to think that well they're
not human beings they don't need to
consent and and the second story is a
and I don't remember the details exactly
but there was a precedent
in uh in the US where the judge
decided that the bot is not is not
entitled to the same protections from
for free speech based on the U uh the
American Constitution that a human being
is simply because it's not a human being
and as such you can a unmask it and
prove who is the proprietor of the B say
if they bmer merged a competitor or or
or a person and so on so forth so they
actually decided that the B is not
entitled to the same constitutional
rights as as the human being behind it
and the same PRI privacy protection as
the human being behind it so very
interesting question again I think with
AI agents it's going to be a bit
different yeah that is fascinating um
you know as we're talking I'm just
thinking again about the cyber security
we said we talk about the cyber security
side of things um could you see these
new agents opening up new cyber security
challenges for companies of course so
for instance there's a $35 billion T
Market behind uh anything to do with
identity it's it's called I am or Siam
so customer identity access management
and you've got companies there that are
behemat that deal with identity but
don't know how to cope with machine
customers and and AI agents cuz they
can't decipher if a user is indeed an AI
agent or not so where does this world
cup go to and it presents a huge
opportunity for cyber criminals again
around fake
identities it also Imagine you you were
a bank robber imagine that was your
career choice but but a real bank robber
in the physical world and imagine you
could use a robot that look looks and
behaves and uh Walks Like a real human
being and that robot cannot be
associated with you or it's going to be
very difficult to ass associate that
robot with you and you would send that
robot to H rob a bank on your
behalf Perfect Crime I mean if the but
is
caught how can you be associated with it
it's it's it's crazy similar to that a
lot of new uh Criminal Enterprise and
criminal opportunities are going to
arise from the fact that you can use a
proxy basically an AI agent to to to
work on your behalf to commit crimes on
your behalf and much much more so how do
you then work on matching the identity
uh between let's say Bots customers um
whoever's visiting a website so we've
done Bots and nonhuman detection again
originally that was the plan also to to
check your your AI enhance check. a and
we've been doing it for years now um a
couple of months ago we acquired a
company called d.com which H produces
what I believe is the best identity
graph uh out there it's certainly the
best I've come across too across
startups as well as incumbent players
together marrying the identity graph
together with human not human and
obviously it's way more granular than
that it's not just not human it's AI
agents that are good versus AI agents
that are bad and so on so forth marrying
those two allows us to not just
understand that this is Alex's uh AI
agent it's also legit working on behalf
of Alex from your device and so on so
forth so that's how we're looking at it
all right guys so we've been talking a
lot about you know AI agents through
this conversation and almost assuming
like they're going to be a fact on the
ground uh
I'm just curious what you think the
state of the current capabilities of
Asians are because again like I
mentioned I've tried operator uh is it
worthwhile as part of the package for
$20 a month uh from open AI for sure uh
but I don't know again if it's um if
it's really up to the point where I'd be
using it uh every day so I am kind of
curious what your experience has been
with these Bots and how how you know how
they perform today and what you expect
them to do moving forward like are they
just going to keep improving without a
doubt without a doubt I've got no
question that AI agents are going to be
able to do every single thing that a
human being can do I think and and that
they're going to improve massively I
don't think people are going to be able
or willing to pay so much for an AI
agent as they do certainly everyone who
can afford a personal assistant would go
the AI agent route but and I think the
real questions there are not if and do
not revolve around whether the
technology is going to be good enough
nor whether it's going to be too
expensive because it's not there's a
100% chance an open AI already said it
and the same's going to go with Google
Gemini and and chrome their browser and
many others it's going to be
commoditized in terms of pricing it's
going to be either free or costing a
modest price kind of like the base the
the the pro what is going the plus
package of open AI the questions around
it are more the psychological questions
of whether the human being would trust
that AI agent to do what it needs for
that to do and across many aspects
whether the human users would entrust a
third party to hold their login details
to their bank account would they trust
them to really choose the right you
mentioned kayak earlier and and renting
a car and you know whether they really
trust them I think history shows us that
the answer is a clear clear clear
yes you know my wife is a clinical
psychologist and and as such she H
worries on whether or not AI is going to
replace her as well and we've kind of we
have an argument about it but ER I think
I think both of us understand that our
generation at least is not going to
trust an AI agent even if it looks and
behaves and like a real human being to
be our our therapist our psychologist
but I think short of that pretty much
everything would be able would would be
enabled by AI agent and replaceable and
trustable by human
beings and so
yeah fascinating stuff all right what
before sign off why don't you tell
everybody um what type of companies that
you work with that check and if people
are interested in hearing more how they
can get in touch sure and so we
currently have about 15,000 uh customers
worldwide um of which about a thousand
are large
Enterprises um across every industry we
work with the top five banks in the US
and top five cyber security companies in
the world and cess companies and
e-commerce companies and and we protect
their entire customer journey and go to
market from anything that's perilous in
artificial intelligence I think now is
the time again if you've got a website
if you've got an app now is the time to
try and figure out how much of your user
base is and is going to be made of
non-human beings and again not just for
cyber criminals or or or fraud
prevention purposes but also even more
so for the purposes of of customizing
your digital experience to match the new
internet world if they want to um if
they want our help in doing that they
should just go to check
cq. and yes sign up and we'll get back
to them
momentarily great well guy I have to say
this has definitely opened up my mind in
terms of what we can expect with AI
agents I think so much of the focus has
been on capabilities and when operators
going to be released to the public and
so few people actually think about what
happens to the internet once this stuff
gets in the hands of let's say the 400
million people who are using open AI or
we even saw a new uh agent come out uh
of China Manis so this stuff is moving
fast it's going to change the internet
and I'm so glad that you came by and
talked to us a little bit about um how
company should be thinking about that
how they should prevent some of the
downsides and and really make use of of
the best parts of this technology so guy
thank you so much for coming by thank
you so much Alex for having
me all right everybody the website is
check.
cq. a and want to again thank guy for
joining us and thanks to you all for
watching we'll be back on the feed with
more interviews soon