Building an AI Azure Ops Workbench — Part 1: From reactive tickets to a proactive copilot
July 8, 2026Two months of innovation: Microsoft Adoption updates from May-June 2026
July 8, 2026
In our conversations with customers, we’ve heard consistent feedback: organizations want to embrace AI agents, but they need the same governance rigor they apply to human identities—adapted for the speed and scale of AI. As agents take on real work, the critical question becomes: how do you give each agent the access it needs to be productive without letting that access become a risk?
For example, an agent tasked with analyzing purchase trends and delivering a report needs the ability to read transaction data from an ERP system. Historically, agents may have used shared credentials or access rights borrowed from an employee. As AI adoption grows, organizations are increasingly adopting dedicated agent identities that provide clearer ownership, accountability, and governance. This gives each agent a distinct identity with a named human sponsor and governed access, while providing enterprise security and lifecycle management.
With a distinct identity for each agent, ownership becomes clear, organizations gain visibility into each agent’s access, and access does not accumulate over time. Knowing which agent has what access, who is responsible for it, and whether that access is appropriate is foundational to secure and govern agents—just as it is for your human workforce.
Microsoft Entra surfaces agent identity governance capabilities that are generally available as part of Microsoft Agent 365.
New challenges for governing agent access
Traditional software is relatively static. Once deployed, its capabilities and permissions don’t change without a deliberate software update. Agents are fundamentally different; their capabilities evolve over time, and each new capability represents a change in the agent’s access footprint. This constant evolution means their access needs to change too, and without governance, that access compounds organizational risk.
As organizations scale their AI agent deployments, security and IT teams are facing new challenges that traditional identity governance wasn’t designed for:
- Overprivileged access: Agents often receive access at runtime, accumulate access over time, and retain it indefinitely, multiplying security risk across the organization.
- No human accountability: When an agent acts autonomously, who is accountable for it? Without clear accountability, no person is responsible for its access or lifecycle.
- Manual lifecycle management policies don’t scale: Organizations managing hundreds or thousands of agents across multiple platforms need consistent access governance policies that admins can manage at scale. They can’t rely on manual processes to track sponsors or determine which agent identities and access assignments are still needed.
Govern agent identity and access with Microsoft Entra Agent ID
Microsoft Entra Agent ID enables organizations to govern agent identities and access at scale throughout the agent lifecycle. For example, an agent identity should follow the below identity and access lifecycle process:
Figure 1: Agent identity and access lifecycle.
Govern access for agents with Microsoft Entra access packages
Access packages, a capability within Microsoft Entra Entitlement Management, brings structure and accountability to the entire access lifecycle for agent identities. Organizations can provide access policies that governs how access is requested, approved, and scoped in the first place, and ensures access is reviewed and expires when it’s no longer needed. The result is access that’s intentional, right-sized, time-bound, and easy to prove in an audit, without slowing teams down. This applies to both assistive agents that require delegated OAuth permissions to act on behalf of users and autonomous agents that operate independently with their own application roles and permissions.
By managing access assignments through access packages, you can:
- Scale efficiently when many agents need similar access rights
- Delegate approvals to the right decision-makers—application owners, compliance teams, or business stakeholders—for high-risk or compliance-sensitive access
- Time-limit access assignments so agents don’t retain access indefinitely
Now consider a scenario where a DevOps agent needs access to certain OAuth permissions. An admin creates an access package policy scoped to agents, with approvals and access expiration settings, so its sponsor can request access on behalf of the agent identity:
Figure 2: Admin experience with access package policy for agents.
Sponsors from across your organization, who don’t need to be IT admins, can use the My Access portal to submit the access request on behalf of the agent identity. The request goes through an approval flow before time-limited access is assigned.
Figure 3: Sponsor experience for requesting an access package on behalf of an agent.
Additionally, Microsoft 365 administrators can use custom policy templates that leverage Microsoft Entra access packages, providing a streamlined experience for governing agent access during onboarding. The AI admin in Microsoft Agent 365 can request Microsoft Entra access packages through Microsoft Agent 365 policy templates. This ensures an agent’s access is secure from day one with approval flows and access expiration, so that the access does not persist longer than needed.
Figure 4: The Agent 365 template to apply access package policy during agent onboarding.
Hold every agent accountable with a named sponsor
Every agent identity and agent identity blueprint in Microsoft Entra can have a designated sponsor—a person accountable for that agent’s access and lifecycle. You can learn more about sponsor responsibilities here.
Agent sponsors provide the human accountability needed to govern agent identities at enterprise scale. By assigning sponsors, organizations can:
- Establish clear ownership for every agent identity
- Enable business stakeholders, not just IT administrators, to participate in governance decisions
- Ensure a responsible person reviews and requests access on behalf of the agent
- Empower sponsors to make lifecycle decisions for agent identities, including renewing, extending, or removing agent identities based on ongoing business need
- Provide a designated contact for audit, compliance and security reviews
- Reduce the risk of orphaned and unmanaged agent identities
Figure 5: Owners and Sponsors of agent identities
Automate the agent lifecycle with Lifecycle Workflows
With Microsoft Entra Lifecycle Workflows, you can add tasks for agent sponsors to your workflows so that as employees change roles, Microsoft Entra automatically:
- Notifies the manager and co-sponsors when an agent’s sponsor moves or leaves, helping ensure no agent is left without accountability
- Transfers sponsorship automatically to a co-worker or manager, so there’s always a human accountable for every agent, even during organizational transitions
Figure 6: Lifecycle Workflows automate sponsor maintenance when sponsors move or leave.
Sponsors can then see a list of agent identities they are responsible for and take lifecycle actions, such as disabling agent identities when they are no longer needed.
Figure 7: The Manage Agents end-user experience enables sponsors to make lifecycle decisions.
The path forward
Organizations benefit most from AI agents when governance is an enabler, not an afterthought—with guardrails in place from the moment an agent is onboarded. The agentic era extends identity governance to a new class of non-human identities that are more dynamic and numerous than the service accounts of the past. The principles stay the same—least privilege, accountability, lifecycle management, and continuous governance—but the mechanisms must evolve to match the speed and scale of agentic AI.
Get started
Ready to bring your AI agents under control with Microsoft Entra ID Governance for agent identities? Explore Microsoft Agent 365 to start a trial and see how you can observe, govern, and secure agents across your organization.
Chirag Dayani
Sr Product Manager, Microsoft Entra Identity and Access Management
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Mark Wahl
Principal Product Architect
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Additional resources
Learn more about Microsoft Entra
Prevent identity attacks, ensure least privilege access, unify access controls, and improve the experience for users with comprehensive identity and network access solutions across on-premises and clouds.