Satya Nadella says AI agents will need identities, security and governance like employees

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has argued that companies will soon have to start thinking about how they handle their AI agents with the future of workplace likely to consist of thousands and even millions of AI powered assistants working alogside humans.

Speaking on the Possible Podcast hosted by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Nadella said, "What is this future of work going to look like when you have, let's call it, 20,000 employees and 2 million agents or 20 million agents? All in a loop,"

Nadella also admitted that he himself uses hundreds of coding assistants at once which leads to him having a high ‘cognitive load’.

“I first need to know, what are these agents? What are they doing? What are their reasoning traces? They need to be fully inspectable, fully auditable..” Nadella said “You now need to give them identities, you need to give them sandboxes, then you need to set policies to govern them”

Microsoft supremo noted how the company is creating the infrastructure needed to manage these AI agents. He told Hoffman how the tech giant has already building a suite of tools like Agent 365 which has Entra, Microsoft's digital identity and network access platform, Defender for security monitoring and Purview, which is used to classify and govern data created by AI agents.

"AI is not like a sort of a technology. It's the future of the firm... This is about what happens structurally in your industry when AI sort of basically knows everything that it needs to know about being in your industry. And if you start there, then I think you will start understanding that this is not just a tech. It is really about a fundamental change to the firm." Nadella added