Executive Summary

Problem: As teams roll out autonomous AI agents they struggle to safely delegate access to third‑party tools—existing IAM and secret management systems are designed for humans and traditional services, leading to credential sprawl, poor auditability, and increased compliance risk for security and engineering teams. This pain is acute across the estimated 1.2M organizations that could benefit from agent-aware IAM, creating real operational and regulatory headaches. What you could build: A developer‑friendly, agent‑aware delegation platform that brokers short‑lived OAuth tokens, enforces least‑privilege policies at the agent level, and captures immutable audit trails; deliver it as an open‑source core for trust and adoption plus an optional managed service and SDKs that plug into popular agent frameworks. Key capabilities would include agent identity, token rotation, human‑in‑the‑loop approvals, and turnkey connectors for major cloud and SaaS APIs. Market opportunity: The addressable market is attractive and timely — roughly $3.6B (1.2M organizations × $3K ACV) driven by rising autonomous agent adoption, platform support for ephemeral credentials, and a strong preference for open‑source foundations with managed options. These trends lower adoption friction and create a clear buying signal from security and dev teams prioritizing automation with auditable controls. Competitive edge and risks: You can stand out by shipping agent‑first primitives, an OSS trust layer, and excellent developer ergonomics that make secure delegation simple, while monetizing through managed services and enterprise features; however, competition is medium and success will require deep integrations with cloud providers, agent runtimes, and a clear standard for agent identity and delegation.

Market Opportunity

Secure delegation and OAuth workflows for AI agents accessing third-party tools targets a $3.6B = 1.2M organizations × $3K ACV (agent-aware IAM & delegated access segment of IAM/dev tools) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 15% YoY (identity & access management + automation tooling CAGR; MarketsandMarkets / industry reports estimate mid-teens growth).

Key trends driving demand: Autonomous agents adoption — as teams automate workflows, they need safe credential delegation and auditability, increasing demand for agent-specific auth.; Shift to short-lived credentials — security best practices and platform support for ephemeral tokens enable automated rotation and lower blast radius.; Open-source adoption in infra — organizations prefer OSS foundations with optional managed services to avoid lock-in, creating distribution opportunities.; Consolidation of developer tools — platforms like GitHub and Slack are adding more granular APIs enabling finer policy controls and connector capabilities..

Key competitors include Ory, Zitadel, Auth0 (now part of Okta), Cerbos.

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Secure delegation and OAuth workflows for AI agents accessing third-party tools

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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