Hertz Drives Identity Security Transformation To Save $240K/month with Agentic AI

As a car rental industry pioneer, Hertz is among the industry’s most recognized brands. Along with its licensees, Hertz operates more than 11,000 rental locations in 160 countries across the globe. The company also offers used cars for sale and operates ride and car-sharing businesses. Hertz depends heavily on technology to differentiate itself and make its customers’ car rental experiences seamless. With AI and automation playing a large role in the business’s strategy, Hertz’s identity security team was challenged to modernize identity security across a complex hybrid environment. They also needed to secure growing numbers of non-human identities (NHIs)—including bots and AI agents—that are powering business processes across the company. In close collaboration with the Saviynt product team, Hertz leveraged agentic AI to onboard 200+ applications onto the Saviynt Identity Platform in mere months. Now, security stakeholders enjoy centralized visibility, automation, and control, even across legacy and proprietary applications. And they’re prepared to support a rapidly expanding digital workforce.

The Opportunity: Revolutionizing Identity Management Across Legacy Systems

In the highly competitive car rental industry, technology is what determines a company’s success. Every aspect of fleet management, pricing, local and national demand monitoring, and customer segmentation needs to be optimized—requiring the use of advanced business analytics. At the same time, customer experiences must be seamless and convenient if the rental car company is to stand out in a highly commoditized market. From online booking to self-service check-in, digital tools have the power to drive exceptional customer experiences. Throughout the recent history of this industry, companies have developed and managed their own applications to differentiate themselves, making software potentially Hertz’s most important business asset.

Automation is essential for creating the frictionless customer experiences at the heart of Hertz’s business model. Automation also makes it possible for customers to go straight from their gate at the airport to their rental car without waiting in line, and it enables Hertz to create the efficiencies that make its pricing competitive. Although these automated technologies enable Hertz to fast-track the customer journey, they can also—if not managed and governed appropriately—open cybersecurity and fraud risks.

“In today’s world, traditional identity security is almost obsolete,” says Gnana Thanikachalam, Senior Director and Global Head of Identity and Access Management at Hertz. “Now we must protect machine identities, bots, and AI agents. Success in the mobility industry is driven by technology, so we always strive to be at the forefront of transformation. To deliver the best-possible technology-enabled experiences to our customers, we must be able to extend consistent governance across all types of identities.”

Hertz has approximately 3,000 corporate employees, many of whom work with homegrown applications to manage and optimize business operations. This technology environment includes several legacy systems that were built over the course of the company’s 75-year history, and some of them continue to run on mainframes. Hertz is in the midst of a major technology transformation, working to become a cloud-first organization while maintaining Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance and meeting other regulatory requirements. Identity security is a core aspect of this strategy.

Operating and maintaining identity security for these legacy systems was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Simply provisioning access for a new user could take five to ten days, since it involved multiple steps and custom development effort. The company could no longer afford these delays, the security and compliance risk they created, or the lack of visibility and control their identity and security teams had lived with. But onboarding legacy mainframe applications onto a modern IGA platform wasn’t simple. There are no pre-built connectors for these apps, and no APIs that make integration effortless.

That’s why Hertz turned to Saviynt. What the identity team was able to accomplish with agentic AI was truly revolutionary.

The Solution: Agentic AI Accelerates Application Onboarding, Boosts Visibility and Control

As an early adopter of Agentic AI for Saviynt, Thanikachalam and his team took advantage of AI agents to fast-track application onboarding at Hertz. Once the team had completed a few simple forms and workflows for each application, the rest of the onboarding process was completed automatically by the AI agent.

“I jumped right in,” says Thanikachalam. “Especially for business-critical applications that need to be SOX-compliant, I could see immediately that Saviynt’s agentic AI capabilities would be a game-changer.”

Not only has Thanikachalam’s team been able to onboard applications onto the IGA platform at unprecedented speed, but they’ve also been able to begin to enforce role-based access controls (RBAC) and dynamic authorizations for the first time. “Before, without these capabilities, an admin would have to select, one by one, each of the 75 servers in our environment that an individual user could have access to. It took five to ten days to provision each account,” Thanikachalam explains. “Now we’re doing it in minutes. All the automations built into the Saviynt AI modules have helped us move so much faster.”

Hertz enjoys a strong and longstanding partnership with the Saviynt team. These relationships extend across all levels of the organization, from engineering teams and architects to sales teams and executives. Technical teams collaborate, while organizational leaders exchange ideas. The benefits are mutual. As a member of Saviynt’s Strategic Advisory Board, Thanikachalam provides feedback to the Saviynt product team to help them better understand customer needs and how their platform is performing in the real world.

“Some vendors go above and beyond to make their customers happy,” says Thanikachalam. “Saviynt is one of them. I can call them at any time of day or night, and they’ll help us. Those relationships are invaluable.”  

The Results: Working Together to Futureproof an Industry Leader

Hertz’s AI strategy is central to its leaders’ vision for the future of the business. The company plans to double down on enhancing the customer experience, leveraging automation and advanced technologies to make renting a car even more frictionless and seamless. They currently use AI-powered vehicle damage screening to streamline the rental return experience, and AI tools to accelerate development and bringing new services to market, and will continue to explore additional innovations and use cases.

In support of this AI strategy, Hertz will implement Saviynt Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) to gain deeper visibility across human, non-human and AI agent identities across the business, Thanikachalam explains. “Hertz’s business model is built on technology. We rely on a digital workforce everywhere we can, our call centers are built on AI, and our customers can always get answers from chatbots. Saviynt ISPM gives us AI-powered workforce and customer identity security, but it also enables us to leverage AI to protect all of our business initiatives.”