Identity May Become as Fundamental to AI Infrastructure as Compute and Cloud

India's race to build AI infrastructure has largely centred on GPUs, cloud capacity, and hyperscale data centres. But as enterprises move AI from pilot projects into production, having a secure digital identity is becoming indispensable.

One of the solutions is using local data centre infrastructure, and to facilitate that, the government announced a 21-year tax holiday to foreign cloud and AI service providers in return for setting up data centres in the country.

One of the players moving in is enterprise identity security provider Ping Identity, which has launched a new data centre in Mumbai, allowing organisations to host supported identity workloads locally while reducing latency and strengthening governance over digital identities. Hosted in Google Cloud's Mumbai region, the deployment also supports customers' data residency preferences as businesses navigate India's evolving privacy landscape and the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act.

"Customers realise it is not just about protecting data. It is about understanding who is accessing it, how it is being used, maintaining accountability and having evidence of every movement of that data," comments Jasie Fon, Regional Vice President of Asia, Ping Identity, in a conversation with AIM.

Ping Identity, which was founded in Denver, US, in 2002, now considers India as among the fastest-growing strategic markets, driven by increasing enterprise AI adoption, stricter governance requirements, and rising demand for trusted digital infrastructure.

Why India, Why Now?

For Ping Identity, opening a local data centre is the culmination of a strategy that began well before the latest AI boom. Fon says the company deliberately chose India as a growth market because enterprise identity was becoming increasingly critical as organisations digitised their operations. 

"When I continued to engage with customers in India, one thing that kept coming up was data residency requirements, particularly from highly regulated industries," she highlights.

The company employs around 300 people in India across engineering, product development and customer support, with the new Mumbai deployment extending that long-term investment.

The greatest pull has been the DPDP Act, as many enterprises are now recognising that identity governance offers an opportunity to modernise how access to critical systems and data is managed.

Identity Becomes AI's Trust Layer

While identity has traditionally focused on securing employees and customers, the rapid rise of AI agents is fundamentally changing its role.

According to Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, 40% of Indian organisations report significant or full AI usage, compared with a global average of around 28%. As AI becomes embedded in enterprise operations, organisations must govern not only people but also autonomous software agents.

Whether an AI agent is approving a bank loan, accessing sensitive patient records, or resetting customer passwords, enterprises need visibility into what information it can access, what actions it can perform, and whether those actions remain appropriately governed throughout its lifecycle, she says. 

That, Fon believes, elevates identity from a traditional security function to a foundational component of AI infrastructure.

"We see identity becoming the foundation, the trust layer of AI," Fon says. "You need traceability, auditability, and governance. If an AI agent goes rogue, you need human oversight and the ability to intervene."

Ping Identity describes this approach as providing a continuous "trust layer" through its Runtime Identity platform, which verifies identity, context, and intent across customers, employees, partners, and non-human entities.

Governance Shifts Beyond IT

AI is also changing who builds technology inside enterprises. Fon says innovation is increasingly originating from business functions rather than central IT teams, with departments deploying their own AI agents to automate everyday tasks.

While this democratisation of AI accelerates innovation, it also introduces governance risks if organisations lack consistent identity controls.

Rather than tying identity to individual AI development platforms, Ping advocates a universal identity layer capable of recognising and governing AI agents regardless of where they are created.

"It shouldn't matter which platform you use to develop your agents," Fon says. "Identity sits within the organisation's infrastructure and should recognise every agent, assign appropriate roles and define what they can read, write and execute." She describes identity as becoming the "control plane" that provides visibility, authentication, authorisation, and governance across enterprise AI environments.

India's Strategic Role Grows

Beyond customer demand, India is also becoming increasingly important to Ping Identity's global operations. Alongside serving enterprise customers, the company's Bengaluru engineering centre contributes to product development and innovation.

"I think India will continue to be very strategic, not just from a revenue point of view, but also from our R&D and engineering capability perspective," Fon says.

Looking ahead, she expects AI to accelerate enterprise identity adoption even further. While many international markets initially focused on customer identity, she observes that Indian organisations are currently prioritising workforce and enterprise identity as they prepare for large-scale AI deployments.