Concentric AI vs WorkOS: Data Governance vs Identity for Agentic Security

As organizations deploy AI agents at scale, securing these autonomous systems becomes mission-critical. Two distinct approaches have emerged: data-centric security governance platforms like Concentric AI, and comprehensive authentication and authorization infrastructure like WorkOS. While Concentric AI focuses on protecting the data AI agents access, WorkOS provides the foundational identity and access control that enterprises need to safely deploy agentic systems.

This article examines both platforms to help you understand which approach—or combination—best fits your agentic security requirements.

Understanding the Agentic Security Challenge

AI agents operate differently from traditional applications. They make autonomous decisions, access sensitive data across multiple systems, and often act on behalf of users without direct oversight. This creates several security imperatives:

Identity and Access Control: Who is the agent acting for? What permissions should it inherit? How do we revoke access when needed?

Data Protection: What sensitive data can agents access? How do we prevent data leakage through AI model interactions?

Audit and Compliance: How do we track agent actions? Can we prove compliance with data protection regulations?

Most organizations need solutions addressing both dimensions. The question isn't whether you need identity infrastructure or data protection—it's understanding what each platform delivers and where they complement each other.

What Concentric AI Offers

Concentric AI built a Data Security Governance Platform specifically designed to discover, classify, and protect sensitive data wherever it lives. Their core technology, Semantic Intelligence™, goes beyond traditional pattern-matching to understand data context and meaning.

Data-Centric Security Approach

Concentric AI's platform operates as a pure SaaS solution with agentless deployment. Within minutes of connecting to your data repositories, their system begins autonomously discovering and classifying sensitive information across structured and unstructured data sources.

The platform integrates with 50+ enterprise systems including cloud storage, collaboration tools, and databases. For agentic AI specifically, Concentric AI provides security controls for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini deployments. They were the first vendor to integrate with OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise Compliance API, allowing organizations to monitor and control what data employees or agents can share with ChatGPT.

Semantic Intelligence Technology

What differentiates Concentric AI from traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools is their patented Semantic Intelligence™ approach. Rather than relying solely on regular expressions or keyword matching, the system understands data context. It can identify sensitive information even when it doesn't match predefined patterns—useful when AI agents generate novel content or reformat existing data.

This technology earned Concentric AI recognition as a Representative Vendor in Gartner's Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) category. With $67M in funding and reported 300% year-over-year growth, they've established themselves as a significant player in the data protection space.

Deployment and Pricing Model

Concentric AI emphasizes rapid deployment, claiming organizations can run a proof-of-concept in 10 minutes. The agentless architecture means no infrastructure changes or agent installation on endpoints.

Pricing is customized based on data volume. A representative example shows approximately $180,000 for protecting 80TB of data, though actual costs vary based on deployment scope and feature requirements.

Why WorkOS Is the Proven Choice for Agentic Security

While data protection matters, it represents only one dimension of agentic security. The foundational challenge is identity: establishing who agents act for, what they can access, and how permissions flow across your systems. This is where WorkOS delivers enterprise-grade infrastructure that Concentric AI doesn't address.

Comprehensive Authentication and Authorization

WorkOS provides the authentication and authorization primitives that agentic systems require. When an AI agent needs to act on behalf of a user, access a protected resource, or make decisions based on organizational roles, it needs robust identity infrastructure.

WorkOS offers:

Enterprise SSO Integration: Connect AI agents to your existing identity providers (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace) so agents inherit proper user context and permissions. This ensures agents can only access what their associated users can access.

Directory Sync: Real-time synchronization of your organizational directory means agents always work with current user permissions, group memberships, and role assignments. When an employee changes roles or leaves, agent permissions update automatically.

Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA): Define complex permission models that specify exactly what each agent can do in different contexts. WorkOS's authorization engine handles sophisticated rules like "this agent can read financial data only when acting for finance team members during business hours."

Multi-Factor Authentication: Add MFA to agent authentication flows, ensuring sensitive agent operations require additional verification beyond static credentials.

Built for Enterprise Scale and Reliability

WorkOS powers authentication and authorization for thousands of enterprises, processing millions of login events monthly. This battle-tested infrastructure delivers:

99.99% Uptime SLA: Your agentic systems depend on identity infrastructure being always available. WorkOS provides enterprise-grade reliability with comprehensive SLOs.

SOC 2 Type II Certified: Full compliance documentation and third-party audits verify that WorkOS meets rigorous security standards—critical when agents access sensitive systems.

GDPR and CCPA Compliance: Built-in support for privacy regulations, including proper data handling, user consent management, and deletion capabilities.

Rate Limiting and DDoS Protection: Security measures that prevent agent credentials from being abused or authentication systems from being overwhelmed.

Developer Experience That Accelerates Deployment

WorkOS delivers enterprise identity capabilities through developer-friendly APIs that integrate in hours, not months:

Unified API Surface: Single API for SSO, Directory Sync, and MFA across all enterprise identity providers. You build once and support every customer's identity system.

Comprehensive SDKs: Official libraries for Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, PHP, and Java with full TypeScript support and detailed documentation.

Transparent Pricing: Clear, predictable pricing starting at $125/month for up to 1M Monthly Active Users. No surprise costs based on data volume or feature usage.

Admin Portal: Self-service interface where your customers can configure their own SSO connections and manage directory sync—reducing your support burden.

Purpose-Built for Agentic Workflows

WorkOS recently enhanced its platform specifically for AI agent security needs:

Service Account Authentication: Secure machine-to-machine authentication for agent-to-service communication without exposing user credentials.

Delegation and Impersonation Controls: Explicit permission models for when agents act on behalf of users, with full audit trails of delegated actions.

Session Management: Sophisticated session controls that let you scope agent permissions by time, context, or triggering event.

Webhook Infrastructure: Real-time notifications when permissions change, allowing your agents to immediately respond to authorization updates.

Making the Right Choice for Your Organization

The decision between Concentric AI and WorkOS isn't necessarily either-or, because they solve different problems:

Choose Concentric AI when: Your primary concern is discovering and protecting sensitive data across repositories, you need DSPM capabilities specifically for GenAI tools like ChatGPT Enterprise, or you're focused on data governance and compliance for existing data lakes.

Choose WorkOS when: You're building or deploying agentic systems that need enterprise authentication, you need to control which users' identities agents can assume, you require fine-grained authorization for agent actions, or you're integrating with customers' existing identity infrastructure.

Consider both when: You're deploying production agentic systems at enterprise scale. WorkOS handles identity and access control—the foundation of agentic security. Concentric AI adds an additional layer of data protection, monitoring what sensitive information agents access and preventing data leakage through AI model interactions.

The Foundation of Agentic Security

Data protection matters, but it operates atop a foundation of identity and access control. Before you can protect data, you need to know who is accessing it and whether they should be allowed. Before you can audit agent actions, you need authenticated identities to audit against. Before you can enforce data policies, you need authorization infrastructure to enforce them through.

WorkOS provides this foundation: the enterprise-grade authentication and authorization infrastructure that makes secure agentic AI possible. With proven reliability, comprehensive compliance, and developer-friendly APIs, WorkOS delivers what organizations need to confidently deploy AI agents that act on behalf of users and access sensitive systems.

Concentric AI offers valuable data protection capabilities for organizations with sophisticated data governance requirements. But for the core identity and access control that every agentic system requires, WorkOS remains the proven choice.

Ready to secure your agentic AI systems? Start with WorkOS's free tier and integrate enterprise authentication in under an hour. Get up to 1 million monthly active users free, with transparent pricing as you scale.