Use Microsoft Entra Agent ID to manage every agent, govern its lifecycle, and enforce access controls as agents scale.
Recently, my team and I met with customers across several industries including finance, retail, telecommunications, and the public sector regarding the topic of agent adoption. During our time with them, several key themes bubbled to the surface. While AI agent adoption is growing rapidly, we need to ensure governance is built-in right from the start and that it is designed for the rapid proliferation of agents. Our customers see agents appearing within their admin portal, but accountability, lifecycle management and access guardrails are lacking, creating situations that could lead to significant security concerns.
Without clear ownership and access boundaries, risk can build quickly without clear insight about what those agents can access or do.
Agents are a new type of identity
From an identity perspective, agents can authenticate, access resources, and take action. As outlined in the Secure Access in the Age of AI report, security leaders need to find ways to manage, govern, and protect agent identities with the same rigor as human identities, especially as they scale agents across the enterprise. What makes agents different is that they do not fit neatly into existing categories. Sometimes an agent acts as an assistive agent and at other times it behaves more autonomously. Unlike traditional apps, agents are not static. As models and workflows evolve, agents can acquire new capabilities, which in turn can change what they are able to accomplish over time.
Without a unique agent identity, customers struggle to address key questions such as:
- Which agent identity is acting?
- What can it access?
- What actions did it take?
These questions point to a fundamental gap in how identity has traditionally been applied. As agents take on more responsibilities across multiple workflows, treating them simply as applications or as extensions of a user's identity is no longer sufficient. Agents need to be recognized and managed as first-class identities. Microsoft Entra Agent ID provides an identity foundation that applications and platforms can integrate with, enabling agents to authenticate, access resources, and be governed using familiar identity controls
When platforms integrate with Entra as their identity provider, organizations gain clearer visibility into which agent is acting, what it can access, and how its permissions evolve as models and workflows change. Built on this foundation, Microsoft Entra Agent ID organizes agent identity around three pillars, helping organizations manage AI agents at scale, govern agent identities and lifecycle, and protect agent access to resources.
Manage AI agents at scale
Organizations consistently face the same initial challenge: gaining visibility into the AI agents operating across their environment. According to our study, 80% of leaders report that AI agent usage has increased over the past year. This underscores the need for a clear view of which agents exist throughout the organization. Microsoft Agent 365 was purpose-built to serve as the control plane for AI agents, tackling the challenges of agent management head-on. With Microsoft Agent 365, organizations can streamline management for AI agents in their environment. Its agent registry provides a unified inventory of all agents operating across the organization, including both Microsoft and non‑Microsoft agents.
Get a complete view of all agents in your organization, including agents built with Microsoft AI platforms, agents from our ecosystem partners, and any agents you register yourself.
A key building block in Microsoft Entra Agent ID is the agent blueprint. An agent identity blueprint serves as a reusable template for creating agents. It defines how agents are created, authenticated, and governed, while still allowing individual agents to be provisioned or deprovisioned independently, as needed. With the agent blueprint, security teams can consistently apply consistent access controls to every agent that is created from that specific template.
Govern agent identities and lifecycle
Once your agents are up and running, one of the biggest challenges organizations face is governing agent identities at scale. As teams experiment and deploy agents across environments, agent proliferation can happen quickly, often without consistent sponsorship, review, or retirement processes.
Effective identity governance must therefore include automated lifecycle management to address agent sprawl. This means ensuring every agent has a designated sponsor, enforcing policies for how agents are created and reviewed, and automatically removing access when agents are no longer needed. Without automated lifecycle controls, dormant or inactive agents can persist and retain access long after their purpose has ended, increasing security risk and administrative burden.
Microsoft Entra Agent ID helps organizations apply identity governance practices across the full agent lifecycle, from creation through decommissioning, so agent growth remains intentional, auditable, and manageable as environments become larger and more complex.
Entra Agent ID supports structured governance by allowing organizations to:
- Identify orphaned agents and ensure every agent always has an accountable human to ensure accountability is maintained as users move or leave the organization
- Automate agent lifecycle management from creation through deactivation to help prevent agent sprawl
- Ensure agent's access is intentional, auditable and time bound with access packages
Identify orphaned agents and automate sponsor assignments.
Protect agent access to resources
One final, and key, pain point they anticipate is maintaining operational control as agents evolve. Our recent whitepaper, Protect Identities in the Era of AI reveals how identity attacks are rapidly increasing as organizations embrace cloud and AI technologies. As agents gain new capabilities and interact with more resources, organizations need confidence that access is adaptive and secure.
Entra Agent ID extends familiar identity controls to agents, thereby providing organizations with the ability to:
- Apply Conditional Access policies tailored to agents, enforcing requirements based on the agent identity and access.
- Block agent access automatically when risk signals increase and detect anomalous behavior such as unusual sign-in spikes or unfamiliar resource access.
Apply Conditional Access for agents: Enforce Conditional Access policies with custom security attributes, and agent compromise risk assessments.
Built for an expanding agent ecosystem
Enterprise environments are incredibly diverse, with organizations building agents across Microsoft platforms as well as a broad ecosystem of non‑Microsoft frameworks and tools. To support this reality, the Microsoft Agent 365 SDK enables developers to extend agents built using any agent SDK or platform with enterprise‑ready identity, observability, security, and governed access to Microsoft 365. By integrating with Microsoft Agent 365, the SDK helps organizations onboard and operate agents from any source using consistent management and identity controls.
Get started
To learn more about Microsoft Entra Agent ID and how it empowers organizations to secure access for AI agents:
- Learn: Microsoft Entra Agent ID
- Explore: Microsoft Agent 365
- Watch: Microsoft Entra Agent ID Explained
- View a demo: Secure access for AI agents, the new frontier of identity
- Ngozi Nwoko, Director of Product Marketing, IDNA
Related resources:
- Webinar series: Microsoft Entra on-demand
- Surfing the AI Wave: Manage, Govern, and Protect AI Agents with Microsoft Entra Agent ID | Microsoft Community Hub
Learn more about Microsoft Entra
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