Route and fulfill IT access requests against your access policy

Requests for access to apps, shared drives and systems arrive through chat, email and tickets with missing details. IT has to work out who the person is, what role they have, who owns the system and whether the request is allowed, then chase an approver. Simple requests wait as long as risky ones, and nobody has a clean record of who approved what.

The agent reads each request from your service desk or chat, identifies the requester and their role from your directory, and looks up the system in a written access policy. The policy puts every system and permission level in a tier: pre-approved for that role, needs the system owner's approval, or not allowed. Pre-approved requests can be fulfilled through your identity provider's workflow; everything else is sent to the named owner with a summary, and denied requests get a polite explanation. After any change the agent checks that the access actually exists, logs the decision, and sets an expiry where the policy calls for one.

1. Write the access policy as data: each system, permission level, owner, which roles are pre-approved, and the default expiry
2. Start with read-only permissions in a handful of low-risk apps as the only auto-approved tier
3. Connect the agent to your service desk or chat intake and to your directory so it can confirm the requester's role and manager
4. Connect fulfilment through your identity provider's own workflows or APIs, using a service account limited to the systems in scope
5. Build the approval step: the owner gets the request, the role and the reason, and approves or rejects in one click
6. After fulfilment, have the agent check the permission really exists, then close the ticket with a log entry
7. Schedule a regular review of temporary access and anything granted outside the pre-approved tier
8. Run in suggest-only mode until IT agrees with its decisions on real requests

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The system owner approves anything outside the pre-approved tier. Admin rights, finance systems, production systems and customer data always need a person. IT reviews the log regularly and owns the policy; the agent never edits the policy itself.

Over-provisioning is the main risk, so fail closed: if the role, system or tier is unclear, the agent routes to a person instead of guessing. Requests can be spoofed in chat, so confirm identity through your directory, not the message text. Give the agent's service account the narrowest scope you can and log every action. Make sure a created ticket is never reported as access granted. Check your compliance requirements (for example SOC 2 or ISO 27001 controls) for how approvals must be recorded.

Measure against your own baseline: time from request to access for pre-approved requests, how many requests needed a follow-up question, and how many access reviews find permissions nobody can explain. The value is quick handling of routine requests and a cleaner audit trail, with risky requests still going to people.