Most of the businesses I work with know roughly how many user accounts they have. They know who joined last month and, if they’re doing it right, who left. Ask the same people how many AI agents are working in their tenant and the room goes quiet. That silence is the problem I want to talk about, because I think agents are about to become the fastest growing identity population in every business.
Agents are identities, not features
An agent that reads mail, files documents in SharePoint, updates a Planner board or posts into Teams is acting inside your environment. It needs access, and that access has to be granted, scoped, watched and eventually removed. In other words, it needs to be managed like a user.
Microsoft has made this explicit. Microsoft Entra Agent ID, now generally available, gives AI agents their own identities in Entra. Each agent identity is created from an agent identity blueprint, and that blueprint must have a sponsor: a person or group who is accountable for the agent. Conditional Access and Entra ID Governance are being extended to cover agent identities too. I like that design, because it forces the question every business should be asking anyway: who owns this thing?
I’ve been living this myself. I recently wrote about running Microsoft 365 connections headless for autonomous agents, and the first thing you realise is how much power a non-human identity can hold.
The maths changes everything
Here’s the bit that worries me. Picture a 20-person firm. Today that’s 20 accounts to look after. Now imagine each person runs three to five agents: one triaging their inbox in Outlook, one building reports in Excel, one built in Copilot Studio to answer client questions, another chasing approvals in Power Automate. That’s potentially 60 to 100 agents, with no new hires. The headcount stays flat while the identity count multiplies.
We already struggle with user sprawl. Agent sprawl will arrive faster and quieter, because creating an agent feels like a productivity win rather than an IT event.
Where it goes wrong
The failure modes are predictable:
- Orphaned agents. A staff member leaves, their account is disabled, but the agents they spun up keep running with nobody watching.
- Over-permissioned agents. It’s easier to grant broad access to get something working than to work out the least privilege it actually needs.
- No inventory. Nobody can list what exists, what it touches or why.
- Hidden cost. Agents consume licences and capacity, and the bill grows without a clear owner.
These are the same identity hygiene issues we’ve fought for years, just bigger and faster.
What I’d do now
For SMBs, and especially for MSPs looking after them, I’d treat agents exactly like people from day one:
- Every agent has a named human owner. No owner, no agent.
- Use a consistent naming convention so you can tell what an agent does at a glance.
- Keep an inventory and review it, just like an access review for staff.
- Grant least privilege and apply Conditional Access where you can.
- Add agents to your offboarding checklist. When someone leaves, their agents get reassigned or retired.
- Monitor activity, and use tools like Purview and Defender to keep an eye on what data agents touch.
MSPs have a real opportunity here. Customers will need someone to count, govern and tidy up their agents, and that’s work that fits neatly beside the identity management we already do.
The businesses that win with AI won’t be the ones with the most agents. They’ll be the ones who still know what every agent is doing and who answers for it. Start counting now, while the number is still small.
