Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is convinced agents will outpace human users across the software world. Redmond’s taking a calculated bet that this future is coming soon – and readying customers to manage these agents.
As agentic “identities” spawn, they will need to be tracked and managed as discrete personas, Microsoft suggests. Not least because some agents will need access to sensitive data – others will need to be kept from it.
To pre-empt this challenge, Redmond has created Agent ID, a framework within Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) – the company’s cloud-based identity and access management service, saying that “agent sprawl can quickly lead to excessive permissions, orphaned accounts, and increased risk."
“We've never added a NEW first class primitive like this in Entra ID You are watching the birth of a new era,” Merill Fernando
Agent ID was created because IT leaders have two overarching concerns when it comes to AI agents, Microsoft Identity Lead Customer Architect Tarek Dawoud told The Stack: visibility and control. Organisations will need to know how many agents are in their environments, how they can govern and secure them – and prevent them from causing data breaches.
