Agent Identities as Collaboration Interfaces

An agent that works like a coworker needs to be treated like one — with its own identity, not just borrowed access.


If you’ve only ever used an AI agent through a web app like ChatGPT, the natural mental model is: type a question, get an answer, done. But that’s a narrow slice of what’s actually useful. The better way to think about an agent is as a coworker: one who can do things on their own initiative, and who you can also pull aside and ask for help directly.

Those are two different kinds of collaboration, and they show up in different places. When the agent works on its own, you see the output land where your team already keeps its work, like a file dropping into SharePoint, and the agent messages you to say so. When you want to hand it something specific, you ask it the way you’d ask a colleague: in a Teams thread.

On its own
Team Files
On request
Can you draft this week's report?
Done — draft attached.
“On its own” is kicked off by a schedule or event set up in advance.

What has to be true for this to work: identity

For an agent to pull off both modes, identity has to be designed into the agent from the start, not bolted on after the fact.

When you ask the agent for something directly, it should act with your access, scoped down to only what you can reach, never more. When it’s working on its own, on a schedule or trigger you set up in advance, it needs its own account, provisioned and scoped by IT ahead of time, sized to the job it’s meant to do.

Skipping this and just handing the agent one broad, shared set of credentials creates an unnecessarily large security risk: one bad instruction and the agent can reach everything it was ever set up to touch, regardless of who asked or why. Without a clear owner, actions taken on your behalf can’t be told apart from actions the agent decided to take itself, which matters once something goes wrong and someone has to figure out what happened.

On its own
You
Agent
Own account · IT-provisioned
On request
You
Agent
Your access · scoped down
Own account when it acts alone; a delegated slice of yours when you ask directly.

Putting it together at Sinusoidal

With those identity principles, the Sinusoidal platform offers that coworker experience in two concrete forms:

A web interface where you can see everything the agent has done for you: every output, whether you asked for it or it acted on its own, in one place.

Recent tasks
Q3 progress reportRequested by you
RFI 0214 responseRequested by you
Weekly translation sweepOn schedule
Corridor model updateOn schedule
Q3_progress_report.docx
A dashboard of every task the agent completed, requested by you or run on schedule.

A presence in Teams where you can ask it for help the way you’d message a colleague, and get a threaded reply back, including files it worked on.

# project-schedule
You
Can you update the schedule with this week’s RFI responses?
Agent
Updated — pushed 3 RFI dates back a week.
Schedule_v14.xlsx
A Teams thread where the agent replies in-line with a summary and an attached file.

Because the agent has its own identity, the files and updates it produces on its own are shared with you the same way a coworker would share their work: visible as coming from the agent’s own account, not silently folded into yours.

Getting that identity model right before rollout is what keeps agent access from turning into a pile of shared logins and untraceable actions later.

If your firm is setting up agent access for the first time, we’d welcome the conversation.

Talk to Sinusoidal