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ZDNET's key takeaways
As AI agents proliferate, IT departments need visibility.
Microsoft is giving agents the same deference as humans.
Microsoft Entra now helps govern every agent's activities.
The array of AI-related announcements that came out of Microsoft's Ignite Conference was so dizzying that it was too easy to miss the significance of certain launches that weren't as sexy as others.
Buried in that tidal wave was news of something called Entra Agent ID, the main idea of which is to use Microsoft Entra to govern AI agents in the same way that Entra currently governs human users; that is, to give each agent a unique, managed identity and apply familiar Entra identity controls such as conditional access, identity governance, and identity protection. Entra is Microsoft's cloud-based identity access management (IAM) solution.
Also: How Microsoft's new security agents help businesses stay a step ahead of AI-enabled hackers
This idea of "personhood" equivalence for AI agents, as my colleague David Gerwitz described it (see Microsoft's new AI agents won't just help us code, now they'll decide what to code), is also getting some airplay from the OpenID Foundation as well as from Okta, a Microsoft IAM competitor. In the same way that IAM systems like Microsoft's Entra have been traditionally used to provision human users with digital identities and access to business resources, there's a growing belief that those same IAM systems should be used to manage the access that AI agents are afforded to those same organizational systems.
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