Ping YOUniverse 2025: Resilient Trust in Motion

Oct 29, 2025

-minute read

Chief Product Officer

Identity is moving fast–AI agents, new fraud patterns, and tightening regulations are reshaping the identity landscape under our feet. At Ping YOUniverse 2025, thousands of identity leaders, customers, and partners came together to confront this dramatic shift.

We compared notes on what matters now:

Stopping account takeover without killing conversion, so security doesn’t tax your revenue engine.
Orchestrating trust signals across apps and partners, so decisions get smarter everywhere.
Shrinking risk and cost with just‑in‑time access, so the right access appears—and disappears—on demand.

This recap distills the most useful takeaways for you: real-world use cases, technical demos within our very own Trust Lab, and deep-dive presentations from partners like Deloitte, AWS, ProofID, Midships, Versent, and more—plus guest keynotes from Former Secretary General of Interpol, Dr. Jürgen Stock and cybersecurity futurist, Heather Vescent. And it’s unified by a single theme: Resilient Trust isn’t a moment. It’s a mindset.

three staff members at PingYOUniverse event

Key Themes, Moments & Reflections

If you’re prioritizing impact this quarter, start here. There were several themes that repeatedly surfaced throughout the event, and these are the topics that showed the strongest ROI signals:

The dimensions of digital identity are converging. The realms of identity assurance, fraud and security are coming together. From the unification of access, governance and privilege, to capabilities needed for workforce, partner, consumer and AI agents, modern identity platforms are consolidating and are more mission-critical than ever.
Agentic AI demands new identity assumptions. The era of AI is upon us and we must adopt new capabilities to ensure agents always act responsibly and that humans always stay in the loop. Ping CEO Andre Durand emphasized during his keynote, “the rise of autonomous agents (personal agents, digital assistants, and digital workers) is forcing identity to evolve, extending trust beyond human users to digital actors.”
Verified trust is the future. Deepfakes, social engineering, and identity fraud in hiring (and more!) have forced us to move beyond “verify then authenticate and authorize” to adaptive, ongoing verified trust that’s continuous and leverages risk signals and real-time context for decision-making. You can’t secure what you can’t identify. As I noted during my keynote, we want to make verification as easy and cheap authentication, both from a user experience standpoint as well as financially, so that you can elevate the amount of trust that you're delivering to your end users at scale.
Security and usability can coexist. Through demos, customer panels, and partner showcases, Ping YOUniverse 2025 reinforced the point that identity should be secure without creating additional friction.
Global consistency, local nuance. Across our seven cities, we saw different regulatory, cultural, and deployment challenges. But we also saw the commonality of core challenges in trust, scale, and automation.

Andre and I chatted on-camera about these themes. Watch our conversation.

Peter Barker on stage presenting on JIT Privileged access

two speakers laughing on stage during closing session

Major Announcements at YOUniverse 2025

Just-in-Time (JIT) Privileged Access

We unveiled a new capability that allows enterprises to grant elevated permissions for the exact time window needed—and revoke them automatically afterward—across the full identity lifecycle. This capability addresses privilege sprawl, reduces standing access risk, and integrates seamlessly with identity governance and access workflows.

AI-Driven Trust Framework

Next, we announced a new framework that redefines enterprise security in an era of autonomous agents and complex non-human actors. This framework weaves together identity orchestration, continuous risk evaluation, and adaptive decisioning to ensure that trust evolves alongside AI-driven interactions. With this launch, Ping is aiming to make identity not just a gatekeeper but a proactive partner in intelligent systems—anticipating threats, validating agents, and enforcing dynamic policies across humans, machines, and AI.

Together, these two announcements push identity beyond static control into an adaptive, risk-aware engine that supports modern scale, automation, and the trust demands arising from AI and agentic commerce.

two award recipients holding up award onstage

Identity Excellence Awards 2025

This year, we had the honor of recognizing organizations that turn identity into a strategic differentiator. Picking the top in each category wasn’t easy, but here’s a spotlight on some of the regional winners:

APJ

Honors organizations advancing enterprise security by implementing Zero Trust principles—ensuring secure access across workforce, partners, and devices while minimizing risk exposure.

Recognizes identity leaders delivering secure, seamless, and engaging user experiences—earning trust and loyalty through frictionless access and thoughtful design.

Celebrates outstanding collaboration between customers and partners—teams that co-create and execute identity solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes.

AMER

Acknowledges identity leaders delivering experiences that earn trust in every sense of the word. These are- incredible partners who are firing on all cylinders, driving innovation in the identity industry, and pushing our products to new heights.

Celebrates customers using Ping Identity to significantly reduce fraud—leveraging adaptive authentication, threat detection, and intelligent access controls to protect users and revenue.

Honors organizations advancing enterprise security by implementing Zero Trust principles—ensuring secure access across workforce, partners, and devices while minimizing risk exposure.

Recognizes customers modernizing their identity infrastructure, especially via cloud adoption, and rapidly realizing business value.

Celebrates outstanding collaboration between customers and partners—teams that co-create and execute identity solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes.

EMEA

Recognizes identity leaders delivering secure, seamless, and engaging user experiences—earning trust and loyalty through frictionless access and thoughtful design.

Spotlights visionary implementations that go beyond the norm—embracing inventive architectures, next-gen technologies, or complex B2B ecosystems to transform identity.

Recognizes customers modernizing their identity infrastructure, especially via cloud adoption, and rapidly realizing business value.

Acknowledges organizations with identity security demonstrated leadership—deploying comprehensive, scalable, global solutions that protect users at every touchpoint, achieve operational excellence, and set the industry standard for robust identity management.

conference attendee standing behind camera being interviewed

three attendees laughing and posing for selfie with props

What Did Attendees Love? Here’s What We Heard.

Great vision and product offerings to protect identities in all forms. It’s getting more critical to be able to authenticate identities in the deeper fake world. Ping is on mission!

Keeping us up to date on the Ping journey, exactly the point of the show…it’s a highly organized and significant event.

Ping has made a huge impact on our success in rolling out MFA for our customers. Thank you for sharing product roadmaps with clients!

...this was, without a doubt, one, if not, the most valuable event I have been to. Not only in terms of the extremely insightful keynotes, one to one sessions and meeting the Ping team in person but also just being able to network with peers and learn from them was invaluable.

It was awesome and I'm looking forward to innovative solutions.

We come to Ping YOUniverse every year, we're a long standing Ping customer. It's really great to see the strategies that are coming together for Ping from Andre and Peter to show us what we can expect in the future, and how we can work together with Ping to deliver great value for our organization.

As a new customer of Ping Identity, wanted to take the opportunity to join...gain access to the vast knowledge area of IAM and make the most out of our partnership. Not only to learn from Ping, but from peers...we're all here to talk about the newest regulations, newest inventions, and newest threats and how we're going to respond to those. It's a must-be event.

Looking Ahead to 2026

As we close the chapter on Ping YOUniverse 2025, our gaze is already fixed on the horizon. The innovations we unveiled—from AI-driven trust to just-in-time privileged access to verified trust—aren’t destinations. They are stepping stones toward an identity fabric that learns, adapts, and scales with your business.

In 2026, we expect to see continued evolution in agentic identity, dynamic policy engines, verified trust at scale, and deeper identity + AI co-design. We look forward to bringing you back to new exciting cities, having new engaging conversations, and uncovering new breakthroughs.

As Andre often says, “Trust is never static, it must be earned, validated, and renewed.” This year, Ping YOUniverse showed us how. In 2026, we’ll push the boundaries again.

Watch Andre and Peter's Fireside Chat

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