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Build a living inventory that connects each AI agent or service account to its accountable owner, purpose, permissions, credentials, dependencies, observed use, and retirement plan. A directory export is a starting point, not a complete inventory: combine identity records with sign-in and configuration data, application or CMDB records, and owner confirmation.

What belongs in an AI agent and service-account inventory?

Inventory the identity that authenticates, the agent or workload it serves, the tools or connectors it can invoke, and the resources it accesses. Those may be separate identities or authorization contexts. Keeping them distinct makes it possible to see which principal performs an action, which credentials a tool uses, and which resource grants access.

Include AI agent identities, agent-related service principals, managed identities, conventional application and service-principal identities, on-premises service accounts, and relevant SaaS OAuth applications. Set the scope according to your organization’s platforms and systems; a product’s inventory view may cover only some of them.

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Which identities should be recorded separately?

Record What it represents Why keep it distinct
Agent identity The AI agent acting on a task It may need agent-specific sponsorship, audit, and lifecycle controls. Microsoft’s Agent ID architecture distinguishes agent identities from regular app registrations and service principals; that is Microsoft-specific guidance, not a universal identity standard. Microsoft: Plan your agent identity architecture
Host application or workload identity The application, service, or runtime hosting or invoking the agent It can authenticate separately from the agent. Microsoft describes ordinary service principals as suited to predictable scripted workloads and its distinct agent identity design for autonomous agent workloads. Microsoft’s architecture guidance
Managed identity or service principal A workload identity used by software to authenticate Record the authentication method and granted access. Microsoft recommends a managed identity when possible, then a service principal if that is not possible; treat this as Microsoft Entra service-account guidance. Governing Microsoft Entra service accounts
Agent-associated user account A paired user object used when a target service requires a user object, such as a mailbox or collaboration workspace Keep it distinguishable from a human workforce account and from the agent identity. Microsoft’s Agent ID architecture guidance
Tool or connector authorization The identity or authorization context a particular tool uses It may differ from both the agent and the person who initiated the task. Track each connector’s permissions and access boundary. Access patterns and controls for AI agents
Resource The API, database, storage service, or other system receiving the request Record its owner and the authorization boundary that permits access. Identity for AI agents

For each relationship, capture who is acting, where the identity runs and how it authenticates, whether a user context is required, how permissions are scoped, how actions appear in audit records, and who sponsors and retires it. Avoid collapsing these relationships into one generic, overprivileged account or shared secret.

How do you find all the AI agents and service accounts?

Use multiple discovery sources, then reconcile them. Microsoft’s migration guidance gives a practical sequence—tag scan, behavioral clues, CMDB reconciliation, and developer attestation—for finding candidates to migrate to Agent ID. Organizations can adapt the sequence to their own identity platforms. Migrate custom app registrations to Agent ID

  1. Gather candidate identities. Export identity records from directories and identity providers; collect cloud workload identities, on-premises service-account lists, and in-scope SaaS OAuth applications. Gather sign-in activity, permission grants, identity configuration, and creation or modification events. Pull in the CMDB or application portfolio as a separate source for reconciliation.
  2. Search useful signals. Look for internal agent-builder tags and naming patterns, app metadata, recent agent-platform use, sign-in patterns, permissions, and audit events. Tags can be strong indicators; behavior and permissions are clues, not proof.
  3. Reconcile candidates to business systems. Match each identity to an application, service, script, agent platform, business process, and relevant resource owner in the CMDB or asset registry. Keep unmatched records visible rather than dropping them.
  4. Ask an accountable person to confirm ambiguous records. Route unmatched or unclear identities to application owners or developers, with a response deadline and escalation path appropriate to your organization. Record who responded, when, and what evidence supported the classification.
  5. Keep classification confidence explicit. Mark a record as confirmed, probable, or unresolved, and identify whether classification is confirmed or inferred. Do not assume the creator, display name, or a team name proves current ownership.

Automated discovery can miss custom agents that use generic permissions and have no recognizable names or tags. A broad candidate list followed by human attestation is safer than treating a scan as definitive. Microsoft’s migration guidance

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What should each inventory record contain?

Use a stable directory or platform object ID as the record key. Keep secret values out of the inventory; store credential type and management details instead. Microsoft’s service-account guidance specifically calls for fields including owner, purpose, permissions or scopes, CMDB link, risk assessment, period for review, and lifetime. Governing Microsoft Entra service accounts

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  • Identity record: stable object identifier, display name, identity class, tenant or environment, enabled status, creation date, and last-modified date.
  • Classification: AI agent, conventional workload or service account, application identity, managed identity, SaaS OAuth app, or unresolved; note whether the classification is confirmed or inferred.
  • Accountability: named accountable person or group, technical contact, sponsor where applicable, last attestation date, and escalation route for orphaned records. A group alias without a reachable responsible contact or escalation path is weak accountability.
  • Purpose and dependencies: business purpose, linked application or service, script, agent platform and model/runtime if relevant, business process, tools or connectors, downstream systems, resource owners, and CMDB or portfolio links.
  • Authentication: managed, federated, secret-, or certificate-based pattern where known; credential expiration; rotation owner; and dependencies. Do not record passwords, secret values, or private keys.
  • Authorization: delegated and application permissions, directory and cloud roles, resource scopes, consent status, and the tools or connectors using each grant.
  • Usage and governance: last sign-in or use, observation window or usage trend, privilege and risk indicators, review date, expected lifetime or expiration date, exception rationale, and decommissioning status.

How do you assign and verify ownership?

Name an accountable owner or accountable team for every identity. That party should be able to explain the identity’s purpose, monitor whether it is being used as intended, and arrange remediation. Where the agent identity model includes a sponsor, record that role separately from the operational owner if doing so clarifies accountability.

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Verify ownership through the application or service record and direct attestation—not by assuming the identity creator remains responsible. When no active owner can confirm purpose and use, mark the record as orphaned or unresolved, assign an escalation route, and track it to a decision. An empty owner field is not an acceptable end state.

How should you review permissions and lifecycle?

Compare access with the actual job

Compare granted scopes, roles, resource scopes, and consent with the stated purpose and observed use. Remove grants that are not needed and challenge broad read/write permissions or elevated roles that the task does not require. Microsoft’s service-account guidance puts the principle plainly: “Grant the service account permissions needed to perform tasks, and no more.” Microsoft Learn: Governing Microsoft Entra service accounts

Where appropriate, separate read and write capabilities by tool, apply policy checks, and require human approval for higher-impact actions such as sending, deleting, changing records, or modifying infrastructure. Log privileged actions. As Microsoft’s agent identity fundamentals guidance says, “The agent can reason about what to do next. Your application should still decide whether the action is allowed.” Identity for AI agents

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Set review and expiry expectations

Record a review period, intended maximum lifetime, credential expiry, and the owner responsible for review or rotation. Monitor sign-ins and deviations from expected use; send logs to a SIEM when local retention or analysis needs require it. Choose review intervals according to risk and organizational policy: the cited Microsoft service-account guidance does not prescribe one universal cadence.

Retire identities when their function ends

When an application, script, resource function, or identity is retired or replaced, check downstream dependencies before disabling or deleting the identity. Record the decommissioning decision and confirm that dependent tools or services no longer need it. Governing Microsoft Entra service accounts

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Can a vendor inventory be your complete source of truth?

A product inventory can accelerate investigation, but its connectors, exclusions, licensing, preview status, and export behavior determine what it actually shows. Microsoft Defender documents non-human identities across Entra ID service principals, on-premises Active Directory service accounts, and OAuth applications connected to Google Workspace and Salesforce. The Defender for Identity inventory page says its Entra non-human identity list excludes managed identities and Microsoft first-party applications. Verify coverage in your tenant before treating a product view as the authoritative organizational inventory. Non-human identities in Microsoft Defender · View the Identity inventory

The Defender for Identity page documents filtering and CSV export, with exports limited to the first 5,000 identities. It also surfaces investigation indicators such as highly privileged, unused, overprivileged, externally unverified publisher, newly discovered, and “Used by AI Agents.” Microsoft defines its unused-identity indicator as no sign-in during the prior 90 days on a page last updated September 29, 2026; that is a product signal, not a universal inactivity standard. The page documenting the export limit was last updated July 2, 2026. View the Identity inventory

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How do you keep the inventory useful?

Maintain the inventory as an operational register linked to source systems, not as a spreadsheet snapshot that becomes stale after export. Preserve stable object identifiers so records can be reconciled over time, and store when each source was last checked and when an owner last attested.

  • Refresh candidate data from identity platforms and relevant SaaS or on-premises sources.
  • Reconcile new, changed, unmatched, and disabled identities against the application portfolio or CMDB.
  • Route unresolved ownership and classification records to the named escalation path.
  • Use review dates and expected lifetimes to drive access recertification, credential changes, and retirement decisions.
  • Keep product-specific coverage limits visible so a filtered view or partial export is not mistaken for complete organizational coverage.

Microsoft’s Agent ID architecture guidance also warns against representing an AI agent as an ordinary workforce user: “Don’t use a regular Microsoft Entra user account for an AI agent.” It adds that labeling an ordinary account an “agent identity” does not make Microsoft Entra govern it as an agent. These statements apply to Microsoft Entra’s architecture, so map the underlying principle to the identity constructs and controls in your own platforms. Plan your agent identity architecture

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