🦾How You Can Leverage:

Microsoft just gave agents their own corporate IDs.

No, seriously.

While you were debating whether ChatGPT could replace your intern, Sarah Bird and team were busy building an entire identity management system for AI agents. 

Because apparently 81% of companies plan to deploy these digital workers in the next 18 months.

And they're gonna need badges.

Sarah is Microsoft's Chief Product Officer of Responsible AI and she joined the Everyday AI show today to help us understand the freshly rewritten playbook that is Responsible AI. 

Why? 

Well, Responsible AI was a lot more straightforward 2.5 years ago when we just had a one-on-one chat with an AI chatbot. 

But now? 

Microsoft’s Copilot, as an example, has options for multiple AI agents to work together, divvy up work, and finish it all on your behalf. 

For real.

That’s why we chatted with Sarah on today’s episode of Everyday AI — because the rules of Responsible AI are changing REAL QUICK and business leaders gotta keep up. 

Here’s what ya need to know. 👇

Sarah dropped some knowledge that made us pause the 1990s Super Nintendo.

(Yes, that reference lands perfectly after today’s convo.)

See, everyone's treating agents like fancy chatbots, but Microsoft just started giving them actual Entra IDs—the same identity system they use for human employees.

Sarah explained how agents are this weird new entity that's not quite a user, not quite an application, but something totally different that needs its own governance structure.

Think about what this actually means for your organization.

Your agent can access customer data. Financial systems. Internal communications. And here's the part that should make you sweat: 

Sarah mentioned these agents will work for hours without any human checking in, just doing their thing, making decisions, accessing systems, coordinating with other agents like some kind of digital Ocean's Eleven crew.

That's not a tool.

That's an employee.

And most companies? They're still treating agent security like it's 2022—no identity management, no access controls, no governance framework. 

Just vibes and prayers. Lolz. 

Microsoft saw this coming and built agent IDs directly into Entra, connected it to Defender for threat monitoring, and made sure when developers build agents in Foundry or Copilot, the identity gets attached automatically. 

No manual process. No forgotten steps. Just smart infrastructure that treats agents like the digital workforce members they're becoming.

Try this: 

Stop what you're doing and open your org chart right now. 

Add a new box called "Digital Workforce" and list every system your entry-level employees can access—that's your starting point for agent permissions. Create three access tiers: basic (read-only data), intermediate (can modify non-critical systems), and advanced (financial/customer data access). 

The key is assigning every future agent to a tier BEFORE you build it, not after it's already loose in your systems doing who knows what.

Picture this scene that Sarah described happening at companies everywhere.

Teams spend months building their perfect agent system, getting hyped about all the time it'll save, crafting beautiful demos for leadership. They reach the finish line, ready to ship this bad boy into production. 

Then someone in the back of the room raises their hand: "So... what happens if it does something weird?"

Cricket sounds.

Panic.

Yikes. 

Here's what blew our minds about what Sarah shared: testing agents isn't remotely like testing traditional software where you check if the login button navigates to the right page. 

You're testing whether the agent understands user intent, whether it picks the right tool from its toolkit, whether it stays on task when working solo for three hours straight without drifting into some bizarre tangent about medieval farming techniques.

Microsoft built specific evaluators in Foundry just for this madness. They test for copyright violations (because no one wants that). They test for prompt injection vulnerabilities (because hackers are creative). They test whether the agent can be tricked into leaking sensitive data (because social engineering works on robots too, apparently).

But here's the kicker that Sarah emphasized: her team at Microsoft tests from DAY ONE of development, not as some afterthought when the CFO is breathing down their neck about launch dates. 

They co-develop the testing alongside the actual system, catching issues when they're tiny problems instead of company-ending disasters.

Try this: 

Before writing a single line of code for your next agent, channel your inner pessimist and write down 10 specific ways it could fail in YOUR environment. 

Not generic "it might hallucinate" fears, but concrete nightmares like "interprets 'review customer feedback' as 'respond to every negative review with a 50% discount code.'" 

Build one test for each failure mode and run these tests every single time you iterate—not at the end, not when you remember, but systematically every time like your job depends on it (because it might).

Remember when everyone freaked out about calculators replacing math teachers?

The intersection of agentic AI and Responsible AI is wayyyyyy different. 

Sarah explained how humans are moving from the "inner loop" to the "outer loop" of oversight, and if that sounds like corporate jargon, let’s break it down into human speech.

Inner loop means you're the helicopter parent of a single AI chatbot—checking every output, approving every decision, basically babysitting a very smart toddler. 

Outer loop means agents might work autonomously for hours while you monitor patterns and aggregates, only stepping in when something looks systemically wrong.

It's like going from being a chatbot micromanager to being an agentic CEO overnight.

Sarah mentioned how even within her own team at Microsoft, they run learning sessions where people share what agents they built, what worked brilliantly, and what failed so spectacularly it became an office legend. 

They're doing this because nobody—and y’all we mean NOBODY, not even Microsoft—actually knows the best patterns yet for human-agent collaboration.

It’s fresh. 

The wildest part?

Microsoft Research just launched Magentic UI, which is literally an experimental playground for testing different ways humans and agents can work together, because the interface patterns we need don't exist yet. They're crowdsourcing innovation because this problem is so new that even the tech giants are making it up as they go.

Try this: 

Sarah's team does something genius that you can steal immediately. 

Start "Failure Fridays" where everyone shares one agent experiment—not boring status updates, but real stories like "I built an agent that saved 10 hours weekly but then it started ordering office supplies every time someone mentioned being 'out of ideas.'" 

Document every pattern religiously, because within a month you'll have a playbook of what actually works in YOUR specific environment, not some generic best practices document that treats every company like they're identical twins.