Your agents need identity infrastructure. Real identity infrastructure — not a service account with a sticky note that says "this is the AI."
Right now, every team building agentic systems is solving the same problem independently: how does an agent authenticate, how do you express delegation, how do you audit what it did and on whose authority. The results are predictable. Custom token schemes. Bespoke role hierarchies. API keys in environment variables being called "agent identity" with a straight face. We've seen this movie before with human identity, and it ended with a decade of SAML migrations.
Agents deserve the same standards-based identity infrastructure that humans get. That means cryptographic identity that works across trust boundaries (SPIFFE gives us a starting point). It means delegation models that express "this agent acts on behalf of this human with these specific authorities" in a way any relying party can verify and any administrator can revoke. It means authorization that's separate from authentication — not "this agent has a token" but "this agent is allowed to do this specific thing, right now, in this context," enforced by policy engines rather than hard-coded logic. And it means audit trails that connect every agent action back to a human authorization decision.
None of this requires invention. The primitives exist: SPIFFE for workload identity, Cedar and OPA for policy-based authorization, verifiable credentials for delegation chains. What's missing is the demand. Cloud platforms won't build first-class agent identity support until practitioners stop accepting workarounds and start requiring the same rigor for their agents that they'd never skip for their humans.
This talk is a practical blueprint for what standards-based agent identity looks like, how the existing pieces fit together, and what you should be demanding from your platform providers instead of building yourself.