iProov founder and CEO Andrew Bud is warning that the identity industry needs to rethink the role of liveness as artificial intelligence agents become more powerful, more autonomous, and more deeply embedded in digital services.
In an ID Talk interview recorded on-site at Identity Week Europe at the RAI in Amsterdam, Bud said his message to the industry is that proof of human presence can no longer be treated as a secondary feature attached to biometric authentication. Instead, he argued, it will become a core requirement for establishing trust in an online world increasingly shaped by agentic AI.
“With the rise of agentic AI, proof of human presence is going to go from being incidental to being foundational,” Bud said. “Absolutely foundational.”
Bud delivered a keynote address at Identity Week Europe focused on the same theme, and said he is now on something of a “mind-changing mission” to persuade the broader identity and cybersecurity communities that liveness needs to become load-bearing infrastructure. In the past, he said, liveness was often treated as a compliance requirement or an add-on to face matching. That approach, he argued, will not be sufficient as AI agents begin to request access to services, act on behalf of users, and trigger transactions or decisions that require human accountability.
In the ID Talk interview, Bud outlined three points at which proof of human presence will become critical in an AI-agent-driven ecosystem. The first is when an entity claiming the privileges of a human being needs to prove that it is, in fact, human. The second is when an AI agent needs to be tied back to an accountable human owner. The third is when a service requires a “human in the loop” to approve an action that exceeds an agent’s mandate.
“A human in the loop is only a human in the loop if there’s a human in the loop,” Bud said. “So how do you know there was a human in the loop?”
Without robust proof of human presence, he warned, the trust model behind agentic AI could break down. “Without it, and without it being robust, the entire agentic AI ecosystem will collapse into chaos,” Bud said.
The conversation also touched on the personal history behind iProov’s founding. Bud explained that before launching iProov, he had founded mBlox, a mobile payments company that was affected by large-scale fraud in the ringtone era. Although regulators later found that the company had behaved appropriately, Bud said the public scrutiny of the incident left a lasting impression and pushed him to focus on the problem of verifying that a genuine person is present during a digital transaction.
“The mission of iProov is that I don’t have to go back on television again like that,” Bud said.
Bud also discussed iProov’s approach to liveness assurance and deepfake resistance. Rather than relying solely on the detection of manipulated imagery, he said iProov’s technology changes the capture environment itself by using the device screen to illuminate the user’s face with an unpredictable sequence of colors, then analyzing the reflected light server-side.
“The concept that somehow you can just look at the imagery and know that it’s real or not is a fallacy,” Bud said. “We actually have to change the physics of the capture process itself.”
He also emphasized the importance of continuous threat monitoring, comparing iProov’s approach to the evolution of antivirus systems. As attackers develop new methods, Bud said, identity verification providers need the ability to observe, analyze, and respond to attacks at speed.
That message extended into enterprise identity as well. Bud said he plans to continue making the case that liveness-assured biometrics will become increasingly important for workforce identity, credential reset, account recovery, contractor access, and the prevention of shared credentials.
The full conversation is available via the media player below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
