Visibility to your organization’s AI agents is the first step in a comprehensive identity and access management solution for non-human identities.
Howdy folks!
We’re entering a new era where AI Agents aren’t just tools, but catalysts for a smarter, more empowered way of working. Many of you have shared that as your teams experiment with building and adopting AI agents, it’s challenging to keep track of these non-human actors. The very thing that makes these agents powerful—their ability to autonomously handle complex tasks and act like virtual teammates—also raises concerns. That’s why it’s critical to track agent identities, manage their lifecycle and permissions, and carefully secure their access to your organization’s resources.
Our goal is simple: bring the same protections and controls you rely on for workforce identities to AI agents—your new digital teammates. With that in mind, I’m excited to share more about the public preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID that was announced today at Microsoft Build. In this first release, we’ve introduced a unified directory of all agent identities created across Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry. That means whether an agent is built by a developer or an information worker, you, as an identity practitioner, can see and securely manage that agent in the Microsoft Entra admin center.
Over the next six months, we’ll release more access management, security, and identity governance capabilities for Microsoft Entra Agent ID, plus support for agents from Security Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot and third-party solutions.
Microsoft Entra Agent ID will provide authentication, authorization, identity protection, access governance, and visibility capabilities to agents created with Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, and coming soon, Microsoft Security Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and third-party tools.
How to try it
Visibility is critical as organizations embrace AI solutions—now you can clearly see which agents have access to your environment. Starting today, you’ll notice a new application type in the Microsoft Entra admin center that makes these agent identities visible. The Agent ID application type gives you a quick way to inventory the agent identities found within your directory.
To give it a spin, sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center and navigate to Enterprise applications. In the filter bar at the top of the list view, set the Application type dropdown to Agent ID (Preview). Instantly, your enterprise application list will narrow down to show the AI agents (created via Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry) that are registered in your tenant.
Agent identities can be viewed within the Enterprise applications area of the Microsoft Entra admin center, seen here in a screenshot of the Public Preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID.Starting today, every agent created in Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio, by anyone in your organization, will be visible by default in Microsoft Entra admin center, with no action required by you.
See it in action
Watch the demo featuring Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Entra Agent ID:
An agent created with Azure AI Foundry automatically becomes visible in a Microsoft Entra tenant, as seen in the Public Preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID.
Watch the demo featuring Copilot Studio and Microsoft Entra Agent ID:
An agent created with Copilot Studio automatically becomes visible in a Microsoft Entra tenant, as seen in the Public Preview of Microsoft Entra Agent ID.
What’s next for Microsoft Entra Agent ID
The capabilities available today are the first steps of our journey to help you secure and govern AI agent identities. We know you need more than just visibility, and we’re hard at work on the next set of capabilities to increase your control over AI agents and the resources they access.
For example, we plan to expand the scope of Microsoft Entra Agent ID to include not only agents built using Microsoft AI platforms, but also agents built with a wide range of AI development tools.
In the coming months, Microsoft Entra Agent ID will introduce exciting new capabilities to strengthen your Zero Trust security posture and help save time for developers and identity practitioners.
For Developers:
- Built-in security controls: Agent identities in Microsoft Entra will be controlled by a least-privileged approach requesting just-in-time, scoped tokens for exactly the resources the agent needs, for example, access to a specific file or a Teams channel.
- Instant enterprise onboarding: Agent identities will be a complete, new identity in Microsoft Entra, so identity practitioners can discover, approve, and audit your organization’s agents using the same tools they already use for apps and users. No extra security reviews. No custom OAuth flows.
- Ready to scale: Register once and your agent can have an identity in other Microsoft Entra tenants, each with its own policies while you maintain a single codebase and telemetry stream.
For Identity Practitioners:
- Richer access controls: You’ll be able to set granular Conditional Access policies and detailed permissions to help ensure AI agents only access the resources they need, based on real-time signals and context.
- Enhanced lifecycle management: You’ll be able to automate least-privilege access from the start, managing AI agent identities with the same rigor as users and services, from creation through decommissioning.
- Expanded auditing and monitoring: You’ll get detailed logs and visibility into agent activities for compliance and security monitoring, so you can trace what actions each agent is taking.
Better together: Collaborating with industry, partners, and you!
We’ve always believed security is a team sport, and this is going to be especially true in protecting AI agents and their identities. That’s why I’m so energized by the progress we’re making as an industry together. Two weeks ago, Microsoft announced our support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, and we’re actively collaborating with the industry to design enterprise grade identity support for that protocol and the popular MCP protocol as well.
Here’s a cool demo of A2A working in real code. To build this, we used Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Entra Agent ID to create a Teams agent that discovers a set of Entra and Meeting room agents in the Entra registry and uses them to book a meeting room and invite team members.
Nikhil Reddy Boreddy, Principal Engineering Manager narrates a demonstration of an agent using the A2A protocol to complete tasks via other agents.
Today, I’m also excited to announce that we’re partnering with ServiceNow and Workday. As part of this, we’ll integrate Microsoft Entra Agent ID with the ServiceNow AI Platform and the Workday Agent System of Record. This will allow for automated provisioning of agent identities that perform duties alongside human employees. In parallel, we’re working to integrate ServiceNow and Workday agent-enabled applications, respectively, with Microsoft Entra Agent ID, so every agent created in ServiceNow or Workday has its own identity.
Our vision is to deliver comprehensive agent identity and access management so you can have peace of mind as AI becomes an integral part of your organization’s workflows. We’re incredibly excited about what’s coming next for Microsoft Entra Agent ID and, as always, would love for you to try out these new capabilities. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Together, let’s make sure every identity—human or agent—is managed and secured.
— Alex Simons
Corporate VP, Microsoft Entra
Learn more on this topic
- Microsoft extends Zero Trust to secure the agentic workforce | Microsoft Security Blog
- Quickstart: View enterprise applications in Microsoft Entra admin center | Microsoft Learn
- AI Agents for Individuals and Businesses | Microsoft Copilot
- Azure AI Foundry documentation | Microsoft Learn
- Microsoft Security Copilot agents overview | Microsoft Learn
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.
Updated May 23, 2025
Version 4.0
Alex_Simons
Microsoft
Microsoft
