Publish Discovered Agents to Agent Registry
Implementation Effort: Low – Registry publication is a straightforward administrative action per agent once discovery is complete.
User Impact: Low – Admin-only activity; end users benefit from improved discoverability but are not directly prompted.
Overview
After discovering existing agents in the environment, the next step is to ensure each one is formally published in the Agent Registry so it becomes visible, governable, and auditable. An agent that exists in the environment but is not published in the registry operates outside the organization's governance perimeter — it cannot be assigned ownership, scoped with policies, or included in compliance reporting. This creates a gap that directly conflicts with the Zero Trust principle of Assume Breach, which requires organizations to maintain full visibility into all entities that access resources.
Publishing discovered agents to the registry creates the authoritative record that other governance controls depend on. Conditional Access policies, lifecycle management, and audit trails all reference the registry as the source of truth. An unpublished agent is invisible to these controls, meaning it can continue accessing data and interacting with users without any governance oversight. For agents discovered during triage that were previously operating as shadow AI, publishing them is the transition from "unknown" to "managed."
This activity also reinforces Verify Explicitly by ensuring that each published agent has an identity that can be authenticated and authorized through standard Entra ID flows. The publishing process captures essential metadata — the agent's owner, its intended scope, and the resources it accesses — which enables security teams to make informed access decisions going forward. Without this step, discovery remains an inventory exercise with no enforcement value.