Watch our exclusive 40-minute on-demand webinar exploring our new AI-generated Flows capability! In this session, you’ll discover how to easily create dynamic user identity journeys with NLP.
By the end of this webinar, you’ll have learned:
Access the webinar at your convenience and see how Flows can transform your identity management approach.
Hi everyone. My name is Leor Melamedov, and we’ll be joined today by George Wainblat. We’ll be talking to you about our new feature, Flows. Flows is our latest edition to Frontegg’s comprehensive Identity Management Solution. And, what makes it really stand out is that it is AI-driven.
This is our first fully AI-driven solution, and it was the first AI-generated Flows workflows product on the market. So, thank you for joining us here today. Just a few notes of housekeeping before we get started, everybody who’s joined is muted so that everybody can fully focus on the webinar.
At the end there’s going to be some time for Q&A. We’ve actually received questions from some of you between the launch and now, so we’re going to be covering the most commonly asked questions. And, if you have any additional questions, if we have time, we’ll get to them, if not, please email us and we’ll get back to you very quickly with an answer.
I know there’s a lot to cover here, there’s a lot to be done with Flows and we can’t wait to show it to you. So, we’ll get started. Next slide, please. So the first 15 minutes, we’ll be covering some of the industry landscapes, some of the background why workflows, what we are calling Flows, is so crucial today, what are the challenges that have led to the necessity of creating this workflow solution and kind of why a flexible and AI-generated workflows is best suited for today’s environment.
And, then we’ll be moving to George, our director of product, who will be going through the product, doing a demo, so you can see it in action. And, we’ll also have some time at the end for a Q&A of those questions. Next slide, please.
So again, I’m Leor Melamedov, product marketing manager here at Frontegg. George Wainblat, our director of product management, has been spearheading Flows, working hard with the engineering team over the past couple of months, perfecting this great tool that can be used, as you’ll see, for more than just engineers.
This is truly different, this is something that not many companies have made accessible and democratized to different roles in their team, but we have, so I hope that you’ll enjoy seeing what you can do with Flows, how versatile it is, and George will be showing that to you in the demo towards the end.
Next slide. So, here’s just some market trends, some context for you guys. So, why Flows? Well, user journeys have actually never been this complex, right? So if you just think back to around 10 years ago, something like a user, an end user attempting to log in was accomplished with a simple email and password.
Of course there were plenty of issues with that, there was potential for breaches, people would get locked out easily, it was not flexible. In response to those rigid identity journeys, we have not just passwords today, we have passwords, SSO, biometrics, social logins, magic links that can be sent to the end user’s email.
There are many ways for end users to get into their system. The problem is things can get tangled if from the backend it’s not handled smoothly and properly. It can get tangled on the backend and then that can impact the end user’s experience, it can also have security implications.
We also see that extra verification after sign on itself. So, that was not something that even existed 10 years ago, at least not commonly. Today what you have is multi-factor is the norm. Of course, here at Frontegg we have dynamic multi-factor authentication, we have different types of MFA. Many providers or almost every provider provides that.
That’s also a norm, but that’s another layer of complexity in that user journey. Once the user is in the system, you also have a lot more complexity than you did just a little while ago. So, it’s not just about basic role-based access controls, but you actually have the ability to customize and enforce access dynamically.
So, this is great. This makes the end user’s journey less rigid, it’s more dependent on their particular cues, their security signals that they’re giving off. So, that means, especially for B2B SaaS use cases, there’s a lot more you can do, but there’s also a lot more things that can get tangled up when you have multiple different types of roles, different subscriptions, for example.
Multi-tenancy also was a lot simpler just a decade ago. It relied on basic data isolation, there was minimal customization for tenants. Now that is completely different. We offer shared databases with tenant ID tagging. Again, this is a great innovation, but it also means there’s a lot more to handle.
And, finally, integrations. So, in the past, there were fewer specialized vendors and tools for basic off. And, today we have multiple vendors and tools that many of you are using in tandem to protect user journeys, so whether it’s bot mitigation, identity verification, fraud detection, even when you’re using a robust solution like Frontegg, it’s very common and in some cases desirable to have multiple different vendors that you’re working with because each one specializes in different things.
So, that last point actually is one of the biggest challenges that led to the rise of workflows in general as well as workflows here at Frontegg, our particular solution, because managing multiple vendors, managing multiple different tools within the same platform has gotten things messy and when things are messy, when code, it requires perfect code and when it’s not your main priority, when this is not your specialty, when identity management is something as an engineer you’re doing alongside what is really your focus, which is developing your core product, this is something that is likely to have some breaks and those breaks are something that can jeopardize your customers, your end customers.
So, this is the impetus for having Flows, having something that connects all of these. We’ll go into that more in a second. Next slide, please, George. So here we have a few of the overarching characteristics of those more complex journeys. So, again, it’s a good thing.
We have more types of authorization and authentication than ever before and that’s a great thing. The problem is that sometimes it can lead to these time-consuming integrations, you can have lack of flexibility. So, on the one hand, there’s a lot you can do with the user’s journey, but there’s also limitations that are inherent.
So, you can’t do everything you want to do, even though it’s advanced authorization and authentication. You have inefficiencies across applications, there are security risks. Oftentimes, the more complex any system gets, the riskier it is because of the coding issue that I mentioned earlier, and difficulty managing different user scenarios.
So many different user types, particularly for B2B SaaS, and that can sometimes get unwieldy. So, next slide, please. And we had multiple customers coming to us with this particular problem. So, we had one of them, Faros AI, they came to us with this problem of we have all of our customers who brought up issues that can be solved with Flows had one common concern, which is they had very complex identity management needs that we were solving for, but their journeys were ultimately static and these led to issues.
So, with Faros.ai, the issue was a security concern. So, Faros.ai wanted to have multiple multi-tenant environments like Salesforce pods where each pod operates through separate web apps and APIs. And, they asked us for the ability to direct users to a specific pod when they log in, making sure that the tenant data users and JWT keys remain isolated across these environments.
So, they didn’t come to us and say, “We need Flows,” but they came to us with this issue that really is saying, “We need to be able to orchestrate different types of users and data across different apps and this orchestration is not currently available, so please help us.”
This was the common theme is describing the problem, not saying we needed a particular solution. Now another ScyllaDB had a user experience problem. So, gathering comprehensive user data without overwhelming them during the signup process was on their mind.
They were interested in enhancing that user experience and providing more personalized signup journey. So, customer experience, especially during signup, is essential to ensure you don’t have early churn to ensure that customers reach the finish line and convert. So, they wanted to implement progressive profiling after signup.
Again, they didn’t say, “We need Flows,” but they said, “This is our problem.” And we got several of these types of concerns about orchestrating different types of user identity experiences, and we saw that there’s a common theme. So, this is kind of the impetus for what we developed here at Frontegg.
Next slide. There’s a precedent for this as well. So, as you can see here, the Gartner Hype Cycle. So, Gartner Hype Cycle tracks different technological trends over a period of time. This one is specifically around digital identity.
So, this is what Gartner, the analyst, identifies as the identity management capabilities that are ebbing and flowing, no pun intended, over the years. So, when we see innovation trigger, that means that there’s an initial interest. It peaks at inflated expectations where people are interested in the solution, there’s a lot of hype around it, but we don’t yet have mainstream acceptance of it, and we don’t see widespread adoption yet.
As time goes on, what you have is more people are using it, they may or may not see it as the norm, maybe some of the hype wears off. And, towards the end of that hype cycle, you see that if that solution, you know, stands the test of time, you’ll see that it’s more likely to be widely adopted, both widely offered by vendors as well as adopted by customers such as yourselves.
So, if you look over here and you see journey-time orchestration, George, can you just, like, move your cursor over? That’s journey-time orchestration, what we’re calling Flows and many companies are calling workflows or something similar, is called journey-time orchestration in Gartner.
It refers to the same thing. What we can see here about it is that the plateau will be reached in around two to five years. What that means is that most customers do not offer this to their end users yet, but they will, the plateau means that they are predicted to offer this widely, have a more substantial number of end users experience the results of this capability, right?
That will happen in the next couple of years. So, it’s not in its infancy yet, right? But it still is a unique capability that is still innovative and can really set you apart, even if your end users don’t know it yet, they have the ability to set up different identity journeys.
So, this is a true innovation. They can do it themselves with self-service. Having that capability allows them to stay ahead of other competitors and really offer something differentiated to the end users. So, this is really great for your customers because it is not widely available yet, but it solves for critical issues, as you saw with a few Frontegg customers who came to us with identity workflow requests.
Next slide. So Frontegg Flows. What is our version of this? Ours is workflows, so we’ll just start very simply, what is workflows for the uninitiated. Workflows in general, also, as we’ve seen called journey-time orchestration by Gartner, it’s what brings together different complex identity journeys.
Whether you have multi-tenancy, whether you have complex login sequences, combining passwords with multi-factor SSO, whatever a particular sequence of identity steps is, you are able to string them all together through Flows.
With Flows, you can describe what you want to build, what that sequence looks like, simply using natural language. So, this means that even product managers, you don’t have to be an engineer, even a product manager can describe a scenario and it will generate that scenario, it will visualize it actually.
And, then you can make adjustments to it afterwards, so it’s not set in stone. So this is the truly revolutionary part of Flows is that it is AI-generated, and it allows users to create their journeys through natural language. This is incredible for security because traditional workflows rely so much on code, and code is an imperfect art, and this is not the core focus of engineers.
It’s inevitable that there will occasionally be bugs. And, when you have a low-code option like we’re offering now, we still have pro code, right, so, you know, if you want to get into the code, that is still possible, but because it is based around natural language, right, this prompt comes up, you just type in what you want, then that visualization makes it easier to see where an identity journey can be tweaked to better suit your security compliance and commercial needs when you can see it visually rather than just be in the code.
And, also it allows you to accelerate time to market for new features and workflows without compromising on compliance or UX, so you can get back to doing what you do best to your core product, wasting less time around coordinating different identity sequences.
And, so this is why Flows was created through natural language, why it is centered around natural language. It is meant to democratize identity creation to product managers as well. Next slide, please.
So, now I’m excited to bring you to our demo. George, will take over from here and he’ll walk you through the product so you can actually see it in action, see what you can do with this, see how your most advanced identity use cases can be managed through natural language as well as the pro code options for those who still would like that.
So, you can take it away from here, George.
Sure. Thank you, Leor, for this great intro. So, my purpose is to have a more technical level workflow regarding the Frontegg Flows. So, what are Flows and what is their purpose? They allows us to create a multiple of user journeys that is tailored to the exact needs of a specific organization.
And, we can do that by a variety of options, we can do it with low-code, we can do it with pro-code. We support both the needs of less technical people in organization as well as the needs of the developers who write code in a direct manner.
All that is wrapped up with our very powerful AI interface that allows us to use native language processing and to allow different stakeholders in organization to describe whatever needs they have, how we want to tweak with workflows specifically.
We see a lot of use cases that are revolving regarding security, how we want to tighten the security of the users who want to add additional checks, we want to meet a certain regulatory or compliance needs within the workflows and we baked these things into our product.
So, what kind of things we can do? We can allow tweaking the workflows in a dynamic manner, we can create context-based authentication authorization, we can change the permissions and entitlements
At the end this allows us to accelerate our customers time-to-market because it takes them much less time to alter, to change the flows that they have, rather than develop everything that they have, you know, encode from scratch.
It takes much less time and brings them a much greater business results. So, what kind of things our workflows allows us to do? So first of all, we have a great number of native Flows that come out of a box within the product, within the platform.
And, we allow to tweak them by changing some of the steps. By adding steps, we can add prehooks and webhooks in relevant locations, we can add entire sub-flows with their own entire logic, which are, of course, very usable. They’re actually mini workflows that themselves, that we can use between different workflows, and we can tweak them, we can ask the AI to explain what workflow does and assist the user in any way.
So, we start with the native flow, and we exemplify that in a couple of minutes. We proceed we select the relevant workflow we want to work on today. We go to a flow editor, and where we can tweak and customize the relevant trade steps, which are like Leor said they are the building blocks of workflow that are executed in a sequential manner.
And, we can add customization by using prehooks, by using a various condition steps, by using a cost to to third party APIs, etc. And, of course, all this comes with validation, with testing and at end the user needs to publish that because we want to safeguard and protect them from doing a mistake.
It’s not automatically propagated to production. It undergoes relevant checks by relevant users. So, maybe it’ll be great time now to have a demo. So, this is the home screen of a Frontegg platform exemplifies in short manner some of our powerful capabilities.
We are now going into the development environment where we are going to the Flows page. So, here we see a list of eight Flows that come. We populated the native Flows through our Frontegg platform. And, these are the Flows where they are most representative Flows of our Frontegg platform.
So, most popular probably here are user signup and the various types of user login. We start with user signup. And, as you can see, this is the shortened version of how the user signup looks at Frontegg.
We can see the various processes where we can add different types of steps. For instance, here we can add a webhook and we can add a number of such webhooks here. But maybe it would be interesting to showcase how we can work with our AI.
So, by clicking on the AI prompt, we can get a full capabilities, and we want to ask a couple of questions regarding what a flow does and how we can tweak it going forward. So currently, I want to ask what a flow does, because it looks like a complex flow it’ll take me a while to go throughout this configuration.
And, here I get a very short and to the point summary for what we see the signup flow really does at Frontegg. Now we are seeking to tweak it and what we want to do, we want to add a preliminary check that checks the email that the user has provided to check it against the third party email reputation service, and which see what kind of score we’ll get.
And, the driver will flow accordingly if it’s had the best reputation to bend it altogether. So, now we see that the AI has automatically operated our flow with this step. And, if you go into it, we see that this is a code query.
And, if you go into the code of it, we see that we are doing a fetch from an API of our choice, and we are getting JSON deck, and then we are checking the result of fraud, and if verdict is block, we are returning an error which we see the email is associated with fraudulent activity, and we are blocking, and otherwise we are allowing the user to continue.
So, this is very interesting. And, this was added, you know, by typing worlds and we have the code created. Now, we want to tweak that a little bit further. And what we see is that now we see that we have a lot of bot traffic coming from a certain country, and we want to block the traffic from there because we don’t have customers in this country.
What we’ll see in a minute, we’ll see how the code will be tweaked accordingly. And, if you’ll see we will go and look in the code itself. So, now we have also have the solution check to see this country is Russia. And, then we are doing a blocking or allowing the process to continue in accordance to
We have a very powerful tool in our hands, and we allow our customers, you know, to really play with that and to see and to have a really great things that we can achieve with that. Things that were properly before you had to know the development language, write the code in a perfect manner and now all these things that can be done by, you know, a broader range of professions or PMs can do that, not only developers and all that comes with a greater ease.
Now maybe we want to see that we have errors in our configuration. If we have errors, we cannot publish a result. We are going to skip that for now. Now, it may be interesting to exemplify some our capabilities that we have.
So, if you go and we can see that we also have abilities to create different types of prehooks, API prehooks where we go to the user-defined API or code-based prehooks like ones that we saw earlier that the AI was was playing with.
We can also create an entire new sub-flow like we’re doing here. And, then when we are opening that, it starts with just a blank sub-flow start movement. And, we can tweak it by adding logical conditions, by adding the web request, going synchronous or asynchronous web request where we are going to some external service.
We can add custom code here as we saw. So, we have a very wide possibilities that we can do here. So it was a wrapping up of a quick demo of showcasing our capabilities. And, we are continuing to work and improve workflows.
This is a very important theme for us in Frontegg. We strongly believe in this kind of capabilities and democratizing the ability to tweak the identity sphere and identity products to a wide range of uses.
Back to you, Leor.
Thank you, George, for that demo. So, I think that was great for covering Flows in a nutshell. Of course, if you want to see a specific part of Flows, deeper or double-click on it, just reach out to your account manager.
It is an add-on, so if you already have scale up or enterprise package of Frontegg Flows is something that you can easily add on. Just speak to your account manager and you’ll be able to get that into your own system if you are in the scale up or enterprise tier.
So, there were two questions that came up in the couple of weeks that Flows has been released. So, different variations of this question have come up and so I thought now would be a great time to bring them up and we can have George cover them.
The first question that we’ve heard a lot of is what makes Flows different from other workflow automation tools, especially when it comes to ease of use and customization? So George, if you’d like to talk a little bit about that it would be great.
Sure. Thank you for that. So, it’s a great question. So, Flow stands out, you know, as intuitive drag and drop interface where low-code, you know, is some industry term that we’re allowing users from all technical levels to create and to customize workflows without any coding knowledge.
So, unlike overall workflow products that require really complex configuration, we overall we build templates which comes with moderate components that can be reused and can be used to easily tailor the flow with specific needs of a user.
And, basically, these needs that we can quickly adapt workflows to be used as business processes, allowing them to evolve the authentication platform and to save time and, you know, reduce the overhead and the cost associated with that. And, on the other hand, we are also empowering the power users, the developers and to give them the opportunity not to use only, you know, no-code, low-code [inaudible], but we also have a possibility to do a pro code and allowing them to write their own JavaScript indirectly into our workflow.
So, basically, we are serving the best of both roles here.
Okay. Another question that came up is how, and George, you already touched on this, but if you can talk a little bit more about it, how does the AI-generated natural language processing feature in Flows benefit non-technical users?
So if you can talk a little bit more about that aspect, I think that’s a really unique part of our specific workflows capability compared to some of our competitors.
This is also great question. So, the AI-powered native language processing it is baked into the Flows and we kind of know we are proud to be the first to the market vendor to release this feature fully baked and working, not know, just something bolt on that was integrated, but it’s inherent part of our workflows capabilities to add the native language processing into that.
And, basically, it allows us the less technical users, like product managers, you know, and other different types of stakeholders to really effortlessly create, you know, and customize complex workflows using everyday language. You know, they don’t need to be able to write code, they don’t need to know a deep drive, you know, SAML or OIDC indicate details, they can explain what we want and it’ll be created for them.
So, we generate for them the corresponding logic, you know, on the fly. And, we significantly really lost kind of the barrier of what users can use workflows and we really believe that we are empowering a border range of team members so that they can contribute to the identity management processes without having the exact coding skill in the specific coding language or scripting language, which is used in some way in some other products.
Great. Thank you for that, George. So, if anybody, again, would like to see more of a particular part of Flows or in action, or see how they can integrate flows into their existing Frontegg platform, please reach out to your account manager, and if you’d like, you can also bring your product manager onto that call or any other technical team member that you think has a use case for this capability that has a problem that we can solve by tying together different identity steps.
So, there’s a lot to be done here, lots of options, lots of flexibility this can offer you. So, very excited that this is on the market for you guys to use. Thanks again, George, for sharing your expertise and doing this great demo. And, if anybody has additional questions, please reach out to us, we’ll get back to you really quickly.
We’re also going to share a recording of this presentation, so you’ll be able to refer back to it or share it with different team members or stakeholders if you’d like. So, that’s a wrap. Thank you for joining us today and thanks, George, and everybody, have a great rest of your day.
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