Satya Nadella: AI agents need identities, permissions, and audits

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says AI agents should be treated like human employees, given identities, permissions, and ways to audit their work. The company is figuring out the tools and policies needed to oversee the many agents it has created. "You need to give them identities, you need to give them sandboxes, then you need to set policies to govern them," Nadella told Reid Hoffman on the "Possible Podcast." Figuring out how AI agents will work with human employees remains a tough problem.

Nadella said he often runs 100 AI coding agents at once, and guiding each through a chat interface creates a heavy burden: "The cognitive load on me managing this is so high," he said. To help manage that scale, Microsoft has built Agent 365, a suite that includes Entra for digital identity and network access and Purview to label data AI agents create.

Those tools aim to control what agents can access and to track their outputs.

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