An AI agent drafts replies to your customers. An automation transfers data between your CRM and billing software. A bot posts notifications in Slack.
These tools are useful. But do you know which accounts they use, what data they can reach and who is responsible for them?
Access management also covers the software acting on behalf of your business: AI agents, bots, scripts and other automations.
You can start managing these identities without launching a large technical project. Begin by identifying their access, assigning ownership and scheduling regular reviews. Here is how to get started—and where MIA can help.
A non-human identity, or NHI, is a digital identity used by software to access a service or data.
A familiar example is a service account: an account dedicated to an application or automation rather than a person.
Four concepts help make this easier to understand:
An API key is therefore a credential to track, but it does not tell you everything about the agent using it.
One agent can use several identities. Several automations can also share the same account or credential. A list of accounts alone will not always provide the full picture.
An AI agent can access your applications in several ways:
In the last case, the application may record an action under the employee’s name without clearly identifying that an agent performed it.
This distinction came up in our discussions with IT and IAM communities: discovering an account does not always reveal what is acting through it. Read the discussion about agent governance.
You therefore need to answer two related questions:
What access exists? This is where identity inventory and governance come in.
Which agent uses that access, on whose behalf and for what purpose? This also requires information about agent execution and activity.
Consider this fictional example.
A support manager sets up an agent to summarize customer requests. To get started quickly, she gives it access through her own account, which has administrator permissions.
A few months later, she moves to another role. The agent keeps running, but nobody knows:
The access has outlived its documented purpose, owner and lifecycle.
Three situations deserve particular attention:
Access without an owner. Nobody can confirm whether it is needed or authorize its removal.
Excessive permissions. An automation retains administrator rights when read-only access would be enough.
Shared credentials. Several agents use the same account or key, making it harder to attribute actions and revoke access selectively.
Start with a manageable scope: agents and automations connected to your CRM, customer support platform, internal documents or financial tools.
For each automation, ask one simple question:
How does it authenticate to the applications it needs?
Review the accounts in your SaaS applications, then supplement that information with:
One participant in our r/ciso discussion described this approach: combining information from the identity provider, cloud IAM and secrets manager to build an inventory. It offers a practical starting point, although it does not guarantee complete coverage. Read their experience.
With MIA: connect the SaaS applications in your scope to centralize the accounts and access records exposed by their connectors. For applications without an API integration, you can create a manual application record. Inventory coverage depends on the information synchronized by each connector. Explore MIA’s access inventory.
An agent may operate autonomously. Responsibility for it should remain with a person.
For every agent or service account, identify an owner who can:
A team name can provide useful context, but there should also be a named contact.
At a minimum, keep a record of:
This record connects business purpose with technical access. It complements your account inventory when your tools do not expose all these relationships.
Does an agent summarizing tickets need permission to delete users? Does an automation posting notifications need to read every conversation channel?
This is the principle of least privilege: grant only the permissions required.
In practice:
With MIA: use the inventory to identify accounts for review, then ask the relevant owners to confirm their needs. Check granular permissions in the source application when the connector does not expose them.
Access that was justified when an agent launched may become unnecessary a few months later.
During each review, check:
Adjust the frequency to the risk. A temporary experiment or sensitive access warrants closer review than a stable automation with limited permissions.
With MIA Pro: you can launch an application access review, share it with a designated reviewer and export the results. Review reminders can be scheduled every three, six or twelve months. The review documents the decisions; flagged access must then be removed separately. Read how MIA access reviews work.
Deleting a key without knowing what uses it can interrupt several automations.
Before removing access, establish:
Also plan for the human owner’s departure: should the agent be retired, reassigned or moved to different credentials?
With MIA: application accounts can be closed remotely when the connector supports it, and closure can be scheduled. API keys, OAuth grants and sessions must be revoked in the relevant source system when that operation is not covered by the account closure. Read MIA’s account provisioning and deprovisioning documentation.
Non-human identity management draws on several sources: applications, identity providers, cloud environments, secrets managers and agent execution platforms.
MIA provides a governance framework for the application access it supports:
MIA’s access log records access management events and decisions, helping you understand their history. A detailed investigation of an agent’s actions also requires logs from its tools and execution platforms. Explore MIA’s access traceability.
The goal: identified access, accountable decisions and verified removals.
Choose three applications and list their known automations. Start with those accessing your most sensitive data.
Connect the applications available in MIA and examine the accounts returned. Supplement your findings with information from your identity provider, automation platforms and secrets manager.
Link each automation to its access and a human owner. Document shared accounts and known dependencies.
Confirm requirements with the owners and launch a review of the relevant accounts. Identify what should be retained, reduced or removed.
Remove unnecessary access, verify that the changes took effect and schedule the next review.
Keep a record of unresolved gaps: keys you have not inventoried, shared accounts or agents using human sessions. This will help you prioritize the next steps.
Discover how MIA helps centralize and govern SaaS access.
An AI agent is software that performs tasks. A non-human identity represents software within a system. An agent may use a dedicated identity, several service accounts or permissions delegated by a user.
Yes. A service account is a non-human identity used by software or an automation. It should have a documented purpose, an owner and appropriate permissions.
SSO helps with authentication, but an inventory should also examine service accounts, API keys and delegated authorizations. Check the actual coverage provided by your identity provider and applications.
Coverage depends on the platforms and available data sources. An agent with a dedicated identity is easier to identify than one operating through a human session. Combining sources and documenting discovery gaps remains necessary.
MIA can contribute through the account inventory exposed by its connectors, access reviews, supported account closures and access traceability. Discovery of a particular service account, agent or credential type must be checked for each connector.
