Govern who — and what — acts in your environment.

Microsoft Entra Agent ID is a purpose-built identity framework for AI agents within Microsoft Entra. As of 2026, it is in preview through Microsoft’s Frontier early-access program and is part of Microsoft Agent 365. Production rollouts are possible with appropriate scoping; full GA timing is determined by Microsoft. We support customers in Frontier-eligible environments.

Service principals were designed for long-lived services with known ownership and managed lifecycle. AI agents are dynamic — sometimes created and destroyed thousands of times per day with no fixed owner. Borrowing service principals creates orphaned credentials, audit blind spots, and access decisions made by the wrong principal. Entra Agent ID solves this by giving each agent its own identity construct.

Microsoft Agent 365 is the unified control plane for observing, securing, and governing AI agents at enterprise scale. Microsoft Entra Agent ID is the identity layer within Agent 365. Together they provide identity assignment, lifecycle management, Conditional Access for agents, and centralized visibility across both Microsoft and third-party agents.

Yes. When Copilot Studio creates an agent in environments with Entra Agent ID enabled, an agent identity blueprint and agent identity are automatically created. This means governance — ownership, access reviews, decommissioning — applies to Copilot Studio agents the same way it applies to other identities. Frontier-eligible customers can pilot this today.

Conditional Access policies extend to AI agents through Entra Agent ID, with adaptive controls that evaluate agent risk, behavioral signals, and context before granting access. Microsoft Managed Policies provide a baseline that blocks high-risk agents, with custom policies available for nuanced cases. Implementation patterns are still emerging as Agent ID matures from preview.

Human IAM assumes long-lived identities with credentials, MFA, and behavioral patterns. Agent IAM assumes ephemeral identities created dynamically, with no human credentials, federated authentication via blueprints, and behavioral patterns measured at machine scale. Both run on Microsoft Entra, but the security model and lifecycle differ meaningfully.

Microsoft Entra Agent ID requires Microsoft Entra ID as the identity platform. Organizations on Okta or other legacy IAM either need to migrate or run Entra alongside their existing platform for AI workloads specifically. Most enterprises find it cleaner to consolidate; Forrester reports 240% ROI on Entra modernization vs. legacy platforms.

Entra Agent ID extends Microsoft Entra ID Governance — the same access reviews, entitlement management, and lifecycle workflows you use for human users now extend to agent identities. This means audit reporting, segregation of duties, and joiner/mover/leaver discipline can be applied uniformly across humans and agents.

Phased: inventory current service principals being used as de-facto agent identities, classify by use case (long-lived service vs. dynamic agent), provision new agent identities for the dynamic cases, migrate access grants, decommission orphaned service principals. The Agent Identity Readiness Assessment maps this for your environment.

Tightly. AI Data Security (Pillar 1) controls what data AI agents can access; AI Agent Identity (Pillar 3) controls who or what is doing the accessing. Without Pillar 3, you can’t enforce least-privilege for agents. Without Pillar 1, even properly-identified agents can over-share. Most enterprises deploy them in sequence — Pillar 1 first, then Pillar 3.