Nina leaves today. What happens to the agent she configured?
Lifecycle & Change Management
Treat agent infrastructure like something you operate.
Give agents, connections, policies and knowledge a deliberate lifecycle. Review changes, release with intent, understand affected consumers and retire access without losing the history.
See it in practice Explore capabilitiesOffboard access, keep owned work
An employee leaves while their agent has a queued task and a separate service workload remains active.
Microsoft TeamsEmployee offboarding
Team conversationI found two different kinds of access.
Offboarding bindingsScope review
- Employee
- Delegated CRM grant
- Service
- Separately owned
- Queued
- Employee grant must be rechecked
Revoke Nina's grant and keep the service workload under its owner.
Nina's grant is revoked. The queued request will be rechecked before any protected action.
The service task still has its own current authority. Nina's queued CRM action cannot start under the revoked grant.
Request rejected. No action was dispatched. A new request needs its own review.
Ready
WHY IT MATTERS
An edit should not change every running agent.
Agents, connections, skills, policies and knowledge evolve. Without a deliberate lifecycle, an edit can unexpectedly change active behavior, an old credential can remain in use or a retired integration can leave consumers behind.
DriftGate connects governed assets to owners, revisions and active bindings. Make a change as a candidate, inspect affected consumers, obtain the appropriate review and activate it deliberately. When an asset must stop or retire, preserve the evidence and dependencies needed to do that safely.
HOW IT WORKS
Draft. Review. Release. Verify.
A new instruction, profile or agent definition should not silently rewrite a released revision. Separate editable drafts from immutable releases. Keep the relationship between the approved revision and each consumer visible, including intentional overrides and task pins.
Release review answers whether a new configuration may be activated. Action authorization still answers whether a particular operation may happen under current policy. Neither replaces the other. Removing an employee or service identity also requires attention to active connections, delegated grants and queued work.
Prepare
Create a candidate and identify dependent consumers.
Review
Evaluate the diff and get the appropriate owner’s approval.
Activate
Release to selected consumers; preserve prior revisions.
Verify
Inspect actual state, then expand or roll back deliberately.
WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL
Lifecycle & Change Management
L01Agent registry
Track ownership, approved definitions, environment bindings and observed running state.
See related workflowsL02Versioning
Separate editable drafts from approved, immutable revisions and their active consumers.
See related workflowsL03Provisioning
Establish supported resources and bindings through explicit ownership and verified enrollment.
See related workflowsL04Change management
Plan, review and activate changes with affected-consumer visibility and a rollback path.
See related workflowsL05Reviews and approvals
Review governed releases and lifecycle transitions without granting blanket execution authority.
See related workflowsL06Rotation
Replace supported credentials and bindings deliberately, accounting for consumer impact.
See related workflowsL07Suspension
Pause intended governed use without deleting history or obscuring in-flight work.
See related workflowsL08Revocation
Remove relevant authority, account for queued work and preserve independently authorized peers.
See related workflowsL09Deprecation
Identify affected consumers and supported replacements before retiring a version or integration.
See related workflowsL10Retirement
Retire scoped resources while preserving required lineage and reconciling uncertain deletions.
See related workflowsIN PRACTICE · EXAMPLE WORKFLOW
Yesterday’s approval is not today’s authority.
A purchase waits for manager approval. Before the approval arrives, the requester loses access or the quote changes.
Retain the pending request and recheck current authority, policy, resource, expiry, quote and approval binding when the workflow resumes.
See the workflowTHE INTENDED RESULT
An unchanged authorized purchase proceeds. Revocation or a changed purchase produces denial or renewed review before dispatch.
THE OPERATIONAL RESULT
Change the intended scope. Preserve the evidence.
A team can test a skill against representative tasks, activate it for a selected group and verify the result before expanding. If a change introduces a problem, select a known approved revision while retaining what changed, who approved it and which consumers received it. Offboarding removes relevant authority, not independently authorized peers.
MORE WAYS TO USE IT
Find your next workflow.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Improve the policy without breaking every agent at once.
A tighter rule prevents one misuse case but could also reject normal order questions across the support fleet.
Agent lifecycle
ENTERPRISE OPERATIONS
Rotate a credential with its consumers in view.
A resource credential needs replacement, but several approved workloads depend on its protected reference.
Agent lifecycle
SECURITY OPERATIONS
Contain the incident without shutting down the company.
An automated responder proposes broad account suspension or a network change after detecting suspicious activity.
Agent lifecycle
YOUR QUESTIONS
A little more detail.
Does saving a draft activate it?
No. Drafts and released revisions are different states. Consumers remain on their approved revision until deliberate activation.
Is revocation the same as undoing an action?
No. Revocation removes relevant authority for subsequent governed use. It cannot recall information already returned or undo an external effect that completed.
How is rollback handled?
Select an approved prior revision and verify its activation on the intended consumers. Keep history intact rather than rewriting the original release.
BUILD WITH INTENTION