Field Guide
Agent identity and delegated access: how AI agents act for people
06
Market and trends
2 min read · Chapter 6 of 10
Who holds the power
- Identity providers hold the consent decision for enterprise agents. Cross App Access moves it from each app to Okta or Microsoft, which weakens individual SaaS vendors. Okta pitches itself as neutral; Microsoft gates agent Conditional Access behind Agent 365 or E7.
- Clouds give agent identity away to win the runtime: AgentCore Identity is free inside AWS's runtime, and Google's IAM calls are free.
- Labs and agent makers choose which login path their agents use and whether they sign their requests, and publish no identity prices.
- APIs and the platforms behind them still decide every call, and which integrations stay listed: Salesforce pulled Drift and disabled Klue.
- Website gatekeepers decide who reaches a site. Cloudflare's July 2026 split between identity and access gives site owners the last word.
- Payment networks decide which agents may pay.
- The person is the weakest party in practice: they approve nearly everything, and the terms make them responsible for what the agent does.
Tailwinds and headwinds
These are the forces I'd watch over the next couple of years. Companies that already hold the employee directory, the cloud runtime or the edge come out ahead on most.
Tailwinds:
| What's changing | Who gains | Who loses |
|---|---|---|
| Agents outgrow spreadsheets: Microsoft counts over 500,000 in its own Agent 365 view. | Microsoft, Okta, Google; discovery vendors | Teams tracking agents by hand |
| Token theft through AI-adjacent integrations repeats: Drift in 2025, Context.ai and Klue in 2026. | Non-human identity vendors (Cisco, Cyera, Okta); short-lived-token products | Integration vendors that hold customers' tokens |
| Security platforms buy the startups: about $4.1 billion across nine priced deals in under a year. | Startups with discovery products; Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, CrowdStrike, SailPoint | Independents without an exit |
| Enterprise-managed authorization spreads: Okta Agent SSO went generally available in August 2026. | Okta, Microsoft and other identity providers; vendors that implement early | Per-server consent flows; app-by-app OAuth work |
| Agent traffic becomes a product: Forrester published its first bot and agent trust evaluation in 2026, and Visa Europe ran live agent transactions in July 2026. | Cloudflare, Akamai, HUMAN, DataDome; Visa, Mastercard | Blocking by user agent alone |
Headwinds:
| What's changing | Who gains | Who loses |
|---|---|---|
| Suites bundle and clouds give identity away: Agent 365 sits inside E7, AgentCore Identity is free inside AWS's runtime. | Microsoft, AWS, Google | Standalone agent-identity vendors |
| No agreed meter, and revenue isn't there yet: Okta calls agent revenue immaterial, and no per-agent price is public. | Buyers, who can negotiate | Anyone forecasting from agent counts |
| Standards keep moving: MCP's July 2026 version removed sessions and deprecated dynamic registration. | Large vendors that track the drafts | Small teams that must rebuild |
| Hype meets budgets: Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027. | Suites already paid for | Startups selling ahead of real deployments |
| Exits are thin outside the security platforms: Stytch reportedly sold to Twilio for about $104 million after a $1 billion valuation, and Cisco no longer sells Astrix on its own. | Acquirers | Developer-first startups; customers of acquired products |
The one thing I'd watch is whether Okta puts a number on agent revenue in its fiscal 2028 guidance, around February 2027, since it's the only large public vendor whose agent business could show up on its own.