An AI agent connected to your business email can draft replies, forward invoices, and schedule meetings without anyone checking each step. That’s what makes it a useful tool. It also makes the agent a credential holder with the same access as an employee, but none of the judgment that stops an employee from misusing it.
Most businesses think of AI as a threat from outside, such as phishing emails written with AI. However, the AI tools within a business can also cause chaos when they’re granted access before proper access guidelines have been determined.
If you’re new to the concept, start with our guide to what an AI agent is. Here, we focus on what happens to your business credentials once an agent has them, and how to stop that access lasting longer or reaching further than it needs to.
What AI agents do inside your business
An AI agent is software that completes multi-step tasks for someone, rather than just answering questions. In a business, that might mean booking meetings, sending emails without approving each one, or pulling customer records before a call.
To do any of this, the agent has to sign in. It needs a password, an application programming interface (API) key, or a token that proves it’s allowed to access your calendar, inbox, or database.
This step is easy to overlook when you’re setting up a new automation. The quickest option is usually to give the agent a credential that already exists, often an employee’s own login, copied into a configuration file or pasted into a prompt.
Different teams in your business can set up their own AI agents without involving your security team. Before long, your business can have dozens of agents using borrowed credentials, none of them tracked centrally or reviewed since setup. For example, a sales manager might connect an AI assistant to your customer database with their own login so it can prepare notes before calls. Your finance team might connect another agent to your accounting software to process invoices, and a support lead might connect one to a shared inbox to draft replies to customers.
The credential problem AI agents create
An AI agent using an employee’s credentials has the same access as that employee, but none of their judgment. A person might stop before forwarding a sensitive file because the request seems unusual. An agent won’t.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) doesn’t close that gap. MFA checks who is signing in at login, not each time a token or API key is used. Once an agent has a valid session or key, nothing asks it to verify again, however unusual the request. The security check your business relies on happened once, at setup.
Unless someone has set up logging for the integration, there’s often no record of what the agent did with its access. If something goes wrong, you can’t easily find out what happened.
This isn’t only a risk for large enterprises. It’s equally dangerous for small teams. If someone connects a scheduling assistant to a shared inbox, or lets a workflow automation tool query a customer database with a login nobody has restricted, it’s risky no matter the size of the business. A mistake, such as a bug, a misconfigured integration, or a prompt injection attack (where hidden instructions in content trick the agent into taking an action), has the same reach as a trusted employee, without any of the checks that slow a person down.
How to limit what AI agents can access
You don’t need to avoid adopting AI agents within your business. Instead, treat their access the way your business would treat a contractor or a third-party integration, rather than trusting an agent as much as the employee who set it up.
Set an expiration on access
An agent that only needs a system for one task shouldn’t hold a credential that works forever. Set an expiration that matches the job, such as an hour for a one-off task or a longer period for an ongoing automation. That way, a forgotten integration doesn’t stay a way into your systems months later.
Give agents only the permissions they need
Minimum permissions matter even more for agents than for people, because an agent uses all the access it has without questioning it. If an agent summarizes recent customer interactions before a call, it needs read access to your customer relationship management (CRM) system and nothing else. It doesn’t need edit rights, access to other systems, or an admin login. Always use zero trust principles when you’re granting access, whether it’s to humans or AI agents.
Use dedicated credentials
Give each agent its own credentials, separate from any employee’s. You can then revoke the agent’s access without locking a person out of their accounts, and a compromised agent doesn’t mean a compromised employee. Sharing an employee’s password with an AI tool is still the most common shortcut teams take.
Keep an audit trail
Log every action taken with an agent’s credentials, including what it accessed, when, and ideally why. With that record, your business can check what an agent did rather than guess. Without it, you often only find a problem after the damage is done, with no way to trace what the agent accessed.
Keep humans in the loop
Every workflow should be designed with humans in mind; ultimately, humans are responsible for what their AI agents do. Agents shouldn’t be able to push changes live without human review, and humans should always review what an agent has done.
How controlling AI agent access helps your business comply with GDPR
If your business processes personal data under the UK or EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the accountability principle applies to your AI agents too. It requires your business to show, not just claim, that personal data is handled appropriately. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) explains what this means in its UK GDPR guidance(nieuw venster).
An AI agent that can read customer records or personal information in an inbox is part of how your business processes that data, whether or not anyone has documented it. The company that develops the agent and the servers it runs on become third-party data processors. Depending on where your business operates, letting them handle that data could break data protection law. The risk is higher with AI providers based in the US, which aren’t covered by strong data protection laws and can be subject to warrantless government surveillance.
If you can’t say which agents accessed what data, or who authorized them, it’s hard to show compliance if a regulator asks.
The same practices that reduce your security risk also create the records you need for compliance. A token with an expiration, minimum permissions, and a full audit trail is the evidence that your business handles its AI tools responsibly.
Decide who in your business owns AI agent access
Most businesses know who approves a new employee’s system access. Far fewer know who reviews what an AI agent can reach, because agents have often arrived faster than the policies to manage them.
Usually, an employee sets up an automation to save time, connects it to the accounts it needs, and nobody else reviews that access. If that employee changes roles or leaves, the agent can keep running on credentials nobody remembers granting.
Assigning ownership doesn’t have to slow your team down. Someone in your business, such as an IT manager, a security lead, or a designated owner for AI tools, should know which agents are running, what credentials each one holds, and when that access is next reviewed.
Ownership is easier when your business has the right tools. If agents use dedicated credentials that are stored in one place, have an expiration, and are logged every time they’re used, the person responsible can see at any time which agents have access to what, and remove that access when it’s no longer needed.
How to set limits for AI agents with Proton Pass access tokens
Proton Pass for Business is a business password manager that gives your business one secure, end-to-end encrypted place to store its most valuable logins, such as admin accounts, API keys, and shared tool credentials. Employees can use the logins they need without copying them into chat messages, spreadsheets, or configuration files, and admins control who can access each password vault. When your team starts using AI agents, the same vaults become the safe place to manage their access too.
Proton Pass access tokens for AI agents are how you manage that access. Instead of pasting a password into a configuration file or giving an agent an employee’s login, your business creates a token that only gives access to specific vaults. You can keep an agent’s credentials in a dedicated vault, so it reaches only what it needs.
Each token has an expiration, from one hour to one year. Agents get read-only access, so they can use a credential but can’t create or edit items. Any time an agent needs access to credentials, it’s prompted to give a reason so you always know what your agents are doing and why. If you need to shut off an integration, you can revoke the token immediately, without changing any employee’s account.
Protect AI agent access like any high-level account
An AI agent isn’t a person, and it shouldn’t use a person’s credentials. It’s software with privileged access to everything it connects to. Give it the same controls you’d apply to any privileged account: limited permissions, complete logs, and an owner who reviews it regularly.
None of this means slowing down adoption. It’s much easier to give each new automation a limited, time-bound token from the start than to audit a year of agents holding whatever access someone granted them under deadline pressure. Combined with the wider practices in our guide to preventing data breaches, this gives your AI tools the same protection your business expects for every other system.
Proton Pass for Business gives your business the controls it needs. It’s end-to-end encrypted, so only your team can see what’s stored in its vaults, not even Proton. Admins can share credentials securely with both employees and AI agents, control who can access each vault, and remove access in one step. Our features for IT teams(nieuw venster) let you manage all of this from one place.
Give AI agents scoped, auditable access with Proton Pass for Business(nieuw venster).
