Every so often, the web changes in a way that rewires how we live.
In the early days, Web 1.0 let us read. It was a window into information — static pages, digital brochures, news sites. We were spectators peering into a new world.
Then came Web 2.0, and we learned to write. We didn’t just consume the web; we co-authored it. Blogs, social networks, wikis — suddenly, the line between audience and creator blurred.
Web 3.0 promised ownership. Decentralized networks and identities, blockchains, Bitcoin, NFTs.
And now, it’s happening again.
We’re moving into Web 4.0: the era of delegation.
Where humans don’t just do things — they delegate them. To agents. To software that not only responds to commands, but anticipates needs and takes action.
With hundreds of millions of monthly active users today, Indeed.com operates at an extraordinary scale.
As we look toward an agentic future, we’re not just preparing for more human users — we’re preparing for a surge of autonomous actors, including malicious agents, interacting across our platform.
It’s not just about knowing who or what is connecting — it’s about ensuring each has exactly the right level of access, no more and no less.
Traditional identity and access management implementations weren’t designed for this level of scale and nuance. To succeed, we need an Agentic IAM architecture that delivers rich authorizations, enables trustworthy delegation, and provides verifiable auditing — all while preserving the speed, resilience, and privacy our users count on.
This post is the first in a series… and is an invitation to follow that journey: the insights, the challenges, and the innovations shaping how we reimagine identity systems for the agentic era.
Ken Adler is a Technical Fellow and Director of Identity and Access Management at Indeed.
David McPike is a Principal Architect with Indeed’s Identity and Access Management team.
For more posts on this topic, visit AgenticIAM.AI .
Disclaimer: This post was crafted with a little help from AI (ChatGPT), but all insights and opinions are entirely my own. No AI was harmed in the making of this post.