Agentic workflows, designed to automate complex tasks, hold immense promise for boosting productivity and efficiency. However, current implementations face several significant shortcomings that hinder their full potential. This blog post will explore these challenges, particularly focusing on seamless authorization and authentication, bypassing paywalls, granular permissions, increasing the reliability of the data by eliminating unreliable data sources and practically removing hallucinations. 

We will then introduce our Agentic Service implementation and outline how we are addressing these critical issues.

Current Shortcomings in Agentic Workflow Implementations

Seamless Authorization and Authentication

One of the most persistent hurdles in current agentic workflows is achieving truly seamless authorization and authentication. Agents often require human intervention to log into services, approve permissions, or navigate multi-factor authentication. While protocols like OAuth are powerful for user-centric applications, they are currently limited in their ability to handle agent-specific authorization and authentication without human intervention. This creates friction and limits the autonomy of agentic systems, requiring manual oversight for what should be automated processes. The challenge lies in designing a system where agents can securely and autonomously gain access to necessary resources without compromising security or requiring constant human approval, not to mention the inability for an agent to handle acquisition of resources.

Inability to Bypass Paywalls

Another significant limitation is the inability for agents to effectively get past paywalls. Many valuable online resources, from reliable  financial data, research papers to premium content, are locked behind subscription models or one-time payment gateways. Current agentic implementations struggle to autonomously process payments or credentials required to access this information. This restricts the scope of tasks agents can perform, as they are often cut off from essential data or services that reside behind a paywall, forcing human users to intervene and manually provide access.

Granular Permissions for Agent-Specific Workflows

The lack of granular permissions applied specifically to agent workflows presents a security and control challenge. In many systems, agents inherit the permissions of the human user who initiated them, or they are granted broad, undifferentiated access. This poses a risk, as an agent might inadvertently access or modify data beyond its intended scope, or identify an unauthorized agent attempting to access restricted data. 

There is a pressing need for a system that allows administrators to define and enforce highly specific permissions for each agent or agent workflow, ensuring that agents only have access to the minimum necessary resources required to complete their assigned tasks.

"Never Send A Human To Do A Machine's Job" -Agent Smith

Our Agentic Service Implementation: A Solution

At viaNexus, we recognize these limitations and are actively developing our Agentic Service implementation to provide robust solutions. Our approach focuses on creating an intelligent and secure framework that empowers agents with greater autonomy and control.

Here's how we are addressing these shortcomings:

• Enhanced Authorization and Authentication Mechanisms: We are developing advanced authorization and authentication protocols tailored for agentic systems. This includes leveraging new cryptographic techniques and secure credential management systems that enable agents to authenticate themselves without constant human oversight, while still maintaining high levels of security. Our aim is to move beyond the limitations of traditional OAuth for agent-to-service interactions, exploring methods that facilitate seamless, machine-to-machine authentication.
  • Extended OAuth: Eliminate human intervention during the Authentication and Authorization handshake, this all occurs during the transport of the protocol.
  • Enhanced Timed Bearer Tokens: Agents are unique to an Organization identified by UUID, will require represented entity approval via asynchronous push notifications for bearer token creation and refresh.

• Fine-Grained Permission Control: We are implementing a comprehensive, granular permission system for agent-specific workflows. This system will allow administrators to define precise access policies for each agent, specifying exactly what resources an agent can access, what actions it can perform, and under what conditions. This ensures that agents operate within clearly defined boundaries, enhancing security and preventing unauthorized access.

• Intelligent Paywall Navigation: Our Agentic Service incorporates mechanisms to intelligently navigate and interact with paywalls. This involves integrating secure payment processing capabilities that allow agents to use pre-authorized payment methods or credentials to access paid content. This feature will enable agents to access a wider range of information and services, significantly expanding their utility.
  • Agents will have secure access to the credit cards of represented entities. This feature will be enabled through our OAuth extension and detailed permissioning schemes and scopes.

Our Agentic Service is designed to be a significant step forward in making agentic workflows truly autonomous, secure, and powerful. We believe that by tackling these fundamental challenges, we can unlock the full potential of agent technology, paving the way for more efficient and intelligent automated systems.

The following clip displays the ease and power of the viaNexus Agentic Workflow, fully incorporating agent Authorization and Authentication using the opensource viaNexus MCP client sdk, by quickly building an agent leveraging Replit, an online AI software development tool that allows the user to dialogue with the developer agent while it writes the software.

It's important to note:
This architectural decision yields significant advantages. Foremost, it dramatically reduces the system's dependency on external data sources, thereby mitigating the inherent risks associated with third-party data integration, such as inconsistencies, security vulnerabilities, or availability issues. Furthermore, by strictly confining data retrieval to the viaNexus Data Platform, the risk of "hallucinations"—where an AI generates plausible but incorrect information—is virtually eliminated. Consequently, the ultimate reliability and integrity of the data presented to the user are directly and solely contingent upon the stringent data quality standards upheld by viaNexus. This controlled environment ensures a high degree of accuracy and trustworthiness in all financial data interactions.

For an exclusive early look at viaNexus's Agentic Workflow service, join our limited beta program. Experience firsthand how this revolutionary service can boost your operational efficiency and intelligent automation. Interested? Contact us at mcp-beta@vianexus.com to discuss how you can participate and be among the first to leverage next-gen intelligent workflow automation.