By David Berlind
Publication Date: 2025-11-26 18:04:00
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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.
