Fireside Chat: How OpenAI and Axel Springer Made Identity a Growth Engine

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) has outgrown its role as a basic security layer. Yet many enterprises are still weighed down by legacy IAM systems that can’t scale, lock them into rigid architectures, and slow down product innovation—ultimately costing users, revenue, and competitive edge. Composable, cloud-native CIAM turns identity from a bottleneck into a growth driver. Modular identity services let organizations adapt quickly to new business models, support internet-scale demand, and align identity with evolving compliance and technology needs—all while future-proofing for AI-driven and agentic use cases. In this session, John Tolbert, Director of Research and Lead Analyst at KuppingerCole, will chart the evolution of CIAM as a business enabler. He’ll show how composable architectures give enterprises the flexibility to adapt to increasing complexity—across business requirements, compliance, and tech stacks—and why forward-looking organizations are using identity to prepare for the next wave of innovation. Jeff Hickman, Head of Customer Engineering at Ory, will share how OpenAI scaled identity to hundreds of millions of weekly users and how Axel Springer achieved a 10x jump in registrations. He’ll also give practical guidance on modernizing CIAM with Ory’s ecosystem and deployment models—enabling enterprises to stay agile and aligned with long-term growth.