The Three Reasons We Recommend Google OAuth for Your Agentic Employee Identity

Introduction: The Identity Problem

If you're the Chief Information Security Officer, the Chief Information Officer, or even the Chief Executive Officer, you want to read this: agentic identity is a problem for all enterprise deployments of AI agents because there's simply no standard. We're in the wild, wild west where every provider has a different approach. There are so many degrees of freedom. You can deploy AI that automates business workflows with varying degrees of access and with any — or no — identity. As we jump in with partners to provide forward deployed engineering support to their AI deployments, we are learning: everyone has a different approach. Some agentic platforms let you choose your agentic identity design.

Reason 1: OAuth vs. DwD — Risks and Control

What is OAuth? You know that ugly Google consent screen? That's OAuth. You must log in and give your username and password to give permission for an application to access your Google resources. You, the user, control access and you control revocation.

What is DwD? Domain-wide delegation. This means that a special service account can access data on behalf of a user. Usually the Google administrator will control which service accounts get domain-wide permissions. The administrator controls access and revocations.

With OAuth, any agent can log in and control access to their data. We think it's easier than having an administrator control access. Let the agent do the work to determine if they want to share access, and let users share data with the Google agent.

Reason 2: Agentic Identity and Access, Constrained by Design

Google identity is cheap. The Google Workspace users are already built and known. You can create and destroy as needed. No need to pay anyone to create an identity for your agent. Just create a Google user and let your LLMs take over. Building a company brain? Now your agent employee can contribute to that brain with an identity and with all their files.

Do we know the costs for Google OAuth and Google identity? Yes: $14 a month per user. Do we know the costs of managing a new domain-wide delegation setup? No. That's unbounded, and it requires ongoing monitoring and maintenance.

Reason 3: New Security Model? Ain't Nobody Got Time for That!

We don't have time to invent new security and identity models for agents. We also don't have the budget to risk testing a new security model for agents. Who pays when the agents act in a security framework that we don't understand, or one that is only a few months old? The pace of automation rewards deployment speed. LLMs are error-prone and probabilistic token predictors. Time is now invested in evaluation, correction, and quality control against errors and hallucinations. This is where the rewards will be, not in creating new identity and security models for agents. That's the tradeoff.

Get Your AI Employees Set Up

At Seren, we're offering Free Forward Deployed Engineering to set up your C-Level executives. Schedule time with us to get your AI employees, and let's talk about speed-running your agentic identity setup.

Taariq Lewis

CEO, Seren

https://serendb.com