Tool of the Week: ServiceNow AI Passport, and the owner your agent still does not have
On October 15, ServiceNow announced AI Passport, a signed credential an AI agent carries and a system checks before the agent acts. The credential spells out what that agent is allowed to do. An agent inside its scope runs freely. One that steps outside can be redirected, restricted, or shut off with a kill switch. ServiceNow says it works for third-party agents too, because it is built on open specifications, and Nvidia is the launch partner for the enforcement side.
The idea matters more than the product. Most agent governance today is an audit log: you learn what the agent did after it did it. A passport checks the permission first. If you have ever granted a service account broad access because it was easier, you know why that is the right direction.
Now the caveats, because the announcement outruns the shipping product. AI Passport is expected by the end of the year, not available now. Pricing was not stated. An analyst quoted by InfoWorld points out that a passport is only as good as the data behind it (the asset inventory and policy records), and that cost tracking exists while throttling and blocking are described as future features. His line: a meter is not a brake.
That is the part worth acting on whether or not you ever buy ServiceNow. Agents are moving from answering questions to running on a schedule with no one watching. Each one needs three things written down: a named owner, a list of what it may touch, and a spending cap. Most teams I would expect to have none of the three for their first unattended automation. A one-page register covers it, and the prompt below builds the first draft.
Quick Hits
Microsoft is giving Copilot Studio agents their own accounts. Announced October 15, per a report the next day: a published agent can get its own Entra ID identity, a mailbox and a Microsoft 365 presence, and can be started by a schedule or an incoming email instead of a prompt. This is separate from the agent node covered in Issue 28. Read the fine print before planning around it. It is in the Frontier preview, requires specific Microsoft 365 licensing plus a license per published agent, bills on usage, and in the preview the shared memory has no per-user privacy boundary and no opt-out. The report also lists limits: no replies to people outside your tenant and no reading of documents labeled Confidential or Internal Only.
ServiceNow also announced background automations that employees describe in plain language. Productivity Routines run without a person in the loop once someone describes the task and picks the tools. ToolSmith is a developer environment for describing automations in natural language, which ServiceNow says was trained on over 75,000 APIs. Those are the company's own claims. The enhancements are in controlled availability now. The same analyst's advice applies: every unattended routine needs a named owner and a budget, and you should ask whether hard spending caps exist today.
Prompt of the Week: The Unattended Automation Register
Help me build a one-page register of the automations in my
environment that run without a person watching them.
Context: [your team or business, e.g. 12-person finance ops team]
Automations I know about: [list: name, what it does, how often]
For each automation, produce a row with these fields:
1. Name and one-line purpose
2. Named owner (a person, not a team). If I did not give one,
write UNOWNED and flag it.
3. What it can read and write (systems, folders, tables)
4. Credentials it uses, and whether they are shared or personal
5. Schedule or trigger
6. Monthly cost if it calls a paid API (ask me for the number
if I did not give it)
7. Spending cap or alert: yes, no, or unknown
8. What happens if it fails silently for a week
9. Last time a human checked its output
Then do this:
- List the five rows with the highest risk and say why in one
sentence each.
- List every field I left blank and the question I should ask
to fill it.
- Do not guess values. Mark anything I did not tell you as
UNKNOWN.Start with the three automations you trust least. The blank fields are the finding.
One last thing
Writing this is one side of the work. The other is building it: data pipelines, file and reporting workflows, integrations between systems that were never meant to talk, and the automation that takes the manual steps out.
If a process in your week still depends on someone remembering to run it, book a free 15-minute audit and I will find your top 3 time-wasters. If it is not worth automating, I will tell you that.
Scott