How Just-in-Time Provisioning Creates Artificial Agent Identities on Demand

Artificial intelligence is entering its agentic era—where AI systems don’t just assist humans, they act autonomously to accomplish complex tasks. These agents can reason, delegate, and interact with APIs and systems across clouds, all at machine speed. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will deploy AI agents capable of acting on behalf of users with minimal human intervention.

But with this new power comes a new security challenge: how do we apply enterprise-grade identity management to actors that didn’t exist a second ago and may vanish a second from now? Traditional identity systems weren’t designed for this kind of velocity. This is where Just-in-Time (JIT) identity provisioning for AI agents changes the game.

Why Agentic AI Breaks Traditional Identity Models

Let’s start with what makes agentic AI different. Human identities are long-lived, predictable, and governed by well-understood lifecycle processes—think joiner, mover, leaver flows. In contrast, AI agents often:

• Exist ephemerally, spinning up to handle a specific task and retiring moments later.
• Scale horizontally in unpredictable patterns, where hundreds of agents may appear and disappear in seconds.
• Act on behalf of delegating identities, including both human users and other AI agents.

This dynamic environment creates problems for conventional IAM:

• Pre-provisioning identities at scale becomes unmanageable—you can’t create and manage credentials for agents that don’t exist yet.
• Long-lived agent credentials create unnecessary risk, expanding the attack surface and increasing the chance of credential sprawl or abuse.
• Auditability breaks down when agents aren’t tied to well-governed identity records.

What we need is a system that can dynamically create, govern, and retire identities at machine speed—without sacrificing security or compliance. That’s where JIT provisioning comes in.

What is Just-in-Time Provisioning for Agentic Identity?

JIT provisioning means creating an identity profile for an agent at runtime, only when it’s needed and only with the permissions appropriate for its task.

Here’s how it works at a high level:

1. A human user or another agent initiates a task (e.g., “book tickets for a concert”).
2. An agent is instantiated to fulfill that task.
3. Identity orchestration software, like Strata’s Maverics platform, dynamically provisions an identity for the agent into the identity fabric (IDPs, directories, or registries).
4. The agent uses short-lived, scoped credentials to complete its work.
5. The identity expires or is retired as soon as the task is complete.

This process ensures that:

• No stale or unused agent identities exist in your environment.
• Every agent action is traceable to an identity record tied to a specific task and delegation.
• Policies like Zero Trust can apply to agents exactly as they do to human users.

How JIT Agentic Identity Works in Practice

At runtime, Maverics uses policy triggers and context signals to determine when to provision an agent identity. These can include:

• The type of agent (e.g., trusted internal service vs. third-party LLM).
• The sensitivity of the operation (e.g., reading public data vs. initiating a financial transaction).
• The identity and intent of the delegator (human or system).

Depending on the agent and task, Maverics supports two main JIT models:

1.Minimal Profile JIT

Ideal for ephemeral agents or external actors. The IDP captures a unique agent identifier and relies on token-based claims (OAuth scopes, JWT claims) to convey attributes. No full directory profile is created.

2. Full Profile JIT

Suited for recurring agents, internal services, or trusted bot frameworks. The agent is registered in the IDP or directory with full attributes—provenance, delegation info, TTL, and risk classification. This allows richer policy enforcement and easier reuse.

In both cases, Maverics ensures that every action is logged, every identity is tied to a delegated trust relationship, and every credential is short-lived and purpose-bound.

Security and Operational Benefits

Least Privilege by Default
JIT ensures agents only have the permissions they need for the task at hand—nothing more, nothing left behind.

Elimination of Credential Sprawl
By provisioning identities on demand and retiring them promptly, enterprises avoid the overhead and risk of managing thousands (or millions) of long-lived agent credentials.

Dynamic Scalability
JIT provisioning scales with your agentic ecosystem—whether that’s 10 agents or 10 million. There’s no limit imposed by pre-provisioned directory records.

Audit and Compliance Readiness
Every provisioned identity and every action it takes is logged and traceable, enabling continuous compliance with frameworks like NIST 2.0, DORA, and GDPR.

Example: Ticket Purchase with Agentic Identity

Imagine a user asking an AI assistant to buy concert tickets. Here’s how JIT provisioning enables this securely:

1. User authenticates with phishing-resistant MFA (e.g., FaceID + OIDC).
2. The AI assistant (agent) is provisioned a JIT identity tied to the user’s delegation.
3. The agent obtains scoped OAuth tokens—for example, tickets:purchase and tickets:read.
4. The agent calls APIs to purchase the ticket, presenting its short-lived token.
5. Maverics acts as a Policy Decision Point (PDP) and a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) and verifies whether the agent has the permissions needed to perform the requested actions by evaluating the attributes in a policy/rule.
6. Maverics logs every step—from agent provisioning to API calls—for compliance.

If the agent needs to verify the user’s age for an age-restricted event, it can invoke a separate age-verification agent, provisioned JIT, that issues a yes/no result without revealing sensitive data (e.g., the user’s exact birthdate).

Looking Ahead: JIT as the Foundation for Zero Trust Agentic AI

As AI agents multiply—potentially outnumbering human identities 80 to 1 in some enterprises by 2030—JIT provisioning will become a core capability for applying Zero Trust principles to agentic systems.

We’ll need to dynamically govern not just who can access what, but which agent, acting on whose behalf, for what purpose, under what risk conditions.

That’s the future we’re building at Strata. Our Maverics platform provides an identity fabric where human and artificial identities are orchestrated with equal rigor—without code rewrites, vendor lock-in, or operational headaches.

Get early access to Maverics Identity for Agentic AI to shape the future of AI identity.