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 alongside 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’.

Satya Nadella on AI agents in workforce:

During the interaction with Hoffman, Nadella argued that AI agents will require many of the same governance mechanisms that companies use with employees.

“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 built 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.

Businesses need to be mindful of AI:

Nadella also had a security warning for companies as more and more enterprises deploy AI agents in their workforce. He warned that businesses cannot afford to take AI systems for granted when it comes to handling their sensitive information.

“Every enterprise now needs to be more mindful about that interplay of humans and their digital estate working together, those trajectories training essentially the models that they keep as IP versus leak it,” Nadella warned. “Because if you leak it, it’s a one-way door. You’re done in some sense.”

“The fundamental reasons why we want is effectively the regime to change or the paradigm to change where you welcome the models to come in. They should hill climb inside a machine that you control. Your data is your context. You feed the model. You collect, in fact, these traces or trajectories of how work gets done.” he added.