1Password Appoints Nancy Wang as Chief Technology Officer to Lead AI Strategy

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan 12, 2026--

1Password, a leader in identity security, today announced the appointment of Nancy Wang as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), where she will lead the global engineering organization and drive the company’s AI strategy, shaping the future of identity security with a focus on trust, usability, and adoption. In this role, Wang will guide the evolution of identity, privileged access, and security as agentic AI increasingly acts on behalf of humans within modern organizations.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260112518263/en/

As organizations move from AI experimentation to deployment, identity and access challenges are evolving. Legacy models were built for human identities with fixed authorization to enable interactive workflows, while AI-driven workflows are non-deterministic, continuous, and rely on non-human credentials such as API keys, tokens, and secrets. 1Password delivers identity security for modern AI workflows while building the trusted foundation for access as AI systems increasingly act on behalf of humans.

“As AI moves from experimentation to real-world deployment, identity security has to evolve just as quickly,” said David Faugno, CEO of 1Password. “We’re rapidly innovating in this next phase of identity security, one that works across both human and non-human workflows, and Nancy’s appointment as CTO reflects our commitment to innovation in this area. Her experience building and scaling security platforms will help us continue delivering the solutions our customers need as AI becomes part of everyday work.”

Wang brings deep experience building and scaling enterprise infrastructure and security platforms. She previously served as General Manager and Director of Engineering and Product for Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Data Protection business, where she helped grow the portfolio to more than 160,000 enterprise customers, protect over two exabytes of data, and scale to more than several billion in annual recurring revenue. Before AWS, she was a founding product manager at Rubrik, helping define the company’s early cloud and data security strategy. Wang is a Venture Partner at Felicis Ventures and an active angel investor; she has invested in and advised high-growth security and AI infrastructure companies, including Chalk.ai, Runlayer, Mercor, Observo (acquired by SentinelOne), Terra Security, Knox Systems, Archil, Clutch Security, and Eon.io. She is the founder of Advancing Women in Tech (AWIT), a global nonprofit committed to offering skills-based training and practical AI literacy to help learners of all backgrounds launch and advance technology careers. Wang also serves on the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Board of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

“AI introduces a new class of identity, one that doesn’t behave like a human and therefore must be governed differently from humans,” said Nancy Wang, Chief Technology Officer at 1Password. “What drew me to 1Password is the deep trust people place in the product and the care the team puts into making security intuitive and human-centric. No matter which AI models or frameworks are deployed, organizations will need a durable trust layer to govern access across human and non-human workflows. I’m excited to build and deliver security that people trust and actually want to use as AI becomes part of everyday work.”

1Password’s approach to AI is secure by design, intuitive by default, with identity security embedded directly into modern workflows. Recent integrations are examples of how 1Password is extending identity security into AI-driven workflows, including just-in-time access to secrets for AI-driven development workflows with Cursor; tighter integration with AWS Secrets Manager to keep credentials consistent across local and cloud environments; secure, in-browser credential access for AI agents through Browserbase; seamless autofill and secure access within ChatGPT Atlas; and native support for Perplexity Comet.

About 1Password

Trusted by over 180,000 businesses, millions of consumers, and 1 million developers, 1Password is redefining identity security for the way people and AI agents work today. Our mission is to unleash productivity without compromising security. The 1Password Extended Access Management product suite delivers zero trust security that protects, manages, and governs access to all SaaS applications, whether managed by IT or not. Built on 1Password’s Enterprise Password Manager, which secures more than 1.3 billion credentials, 1Password’s Agentic AI capabilities extend identity security to AI agents and other non-human identities. Leading companies such as Asana, Associated Press, Browserbase, Canva, Cresta, Golden State Warriors, Hugging Face, MongoDB, Octopus Energy, Salesforce, SandboxAQ, Slack, Stripe, and Under Armour trust 1Password to provide the right person or AI agent the right access to the right app from a trusted device. Learn more at 1Password.com.

Nancy Wang, Chief Technology Officer at 1Password

MUNICH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 20, 2026--

Dr. James Yu, Chairman and CEO of autonomous vehicle technology leader QCraft, engaged in an in-depth discussion with industry experts at the Intelligent Vehicles & Production 2026 conference on March 18, contending that autonomous driving is the most commercially viable pathway to physical AI—the emerging class of intelligence that understands and operates in the real world.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260320906995/en/

The two-day conference, held in Garching bei München and jointly organized by the Center Automotive Research (CAR) and Technische Universität München (TUM), drew senior leaders from Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Bosch, Siemens, Rheinmetall, and other major industry players for a series of discussions on the future of intelligent vehicles, autonomous driving, and production innovation.

Dr. Yu's presentation, titled "Beyond Autonomous Driving: Physical AI in the Real World," was followed by a detailed exchange with Professor Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, founder of the Center Automotive Research in Bochum, Germany, and host of the forum. The conversation touched on the challenges and opportunities of bringing physical AI from theory to production at global scale.

During the session, which also featured Nico Michels of Siemens, Dr. Christian Steinborn of Rheinmetall, and Prof. Alois Knoll of TUM, Dr. Yu traced the arc of autonomous driving through three distinct stages. The first, he explained, relied on modular machine intelligence, where perception, prediction, and planning operated independently. The second saw the rise of human-like end-to-end learning, with AI trained on massive datasets to mimic human driving behavior. Now, in 2026, Dr. Yu maintained the industry is entering a third and defining phase: superhuman intelligence, driven by VLA large models, world models, and reinforcement learning. This is where AI no longer imitates humans but begins to truly understand the physical world.

"In the digital world, AI has already approached the level of general intelligence, and may even be entering the era of superintelligence. But the next great breakthrough will come from the physical world. When AI begins to understand gravity, friction, and human intention, that is where the biggest impact will be felt,” said Dr. Yu.

As an example of how this vision is becoming a reality, Dr. Yu pointed to a major milestone QCraft reached: more than one million vehicles now operate with the company's Navigate on Autopilot system. He described each of those vehicles as a robot on four wheels, collecting real-world data from complex and unpredictable driving scenarios every day. Taken together, he emphasized, this growing fleet forms an unmatched training ground for physical AI.

A central topic in the discussion was the core challenge facing autonomous driving: testing in the physical world is inherently costly and time-consuming. Because autonomous driving must be thoroughly validated across an enormous range of scenarios to ensure safety, Dr. Yu underscored, achieving that bar is exceptionally difficult. That is why QCraft has built what Dr. Yu likened to a virtual driving school, where world models simulate millions of these safety-critical scenarios and reinforcement learning allows the AI to test, fail, and optimize its decisions, all before the vehicle hits the road.

QCraft chose Munich for its European headquarters, which opened in September 2025. That was no coincidence, Dr. Yu said. Munich sits at the crossroads of two worlds QCraft wants to bridge: the fast-moving AI ecosystem forged on China's dense, unpredictable roads, and Germany's century-long tradition of automotive engineering excellence. The company is now actively building a team there, recruiting top talent to support its global expansion.

Dr. Yu closed with a broader ambition. What QCraft is building, he said, is not simply a smarter car. It is a physical intelligence platform. Today it drives passenger cars. Tomorrow, he suggested, the same underlying intelligence could power robots and any machine that must perceive, reason, and act in the physical world. The autonomous vehicle, in his telling, is just the first chapter.

About QCraft

QCraft is a global leader in L2++ to L4 autonomous driving (AD) solutions for automakers. Founded in Silicon Valley in 2019, the company has deployed its technology in more than 1 million vehicles. Powered by a world-class R&D team and partnerships with leading OEMs and tech companies, QCraft combines proven large-scale adoption with industry-leading safety and efficiency to bring autonomous driving into real life.

Dr. James Yu of QCraft and Prof. Dr. Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, the founder of the Center Automotive Research (CAR)