Try It Out

Each walkthrough on this page runs one of the agent identity patterns from Identity for AI Agents against a working sample.

Meet Wayfinder

Wayfinder is a travel-booking application with an AI agent built in, the Wayfinder Concierge, an in-app chat assistant. Through Wayfinder, consumers search for flights and hotels, book trips, and ask the Concierge to do the same on their behalf.

Wayfinder has two principals you'll meet in these walkthroughs: consumers who book travel and chat with the agent, and the Wayfinder Concierge that acts as their assistant. Each carries its own identity in ThunderID.

Meet the Cast

• Consumers book travel and chat with the agent.
  • John Doe is the customer with full access. He can book through the UI and talk to the Wayfinder Concierge. He carries both the Booking User and Chat User roles.
  • Jane Smith also books through the UI, but does not have access to the Wayfinder Concierge. She carries only the Booking User role.
• The Wayfinder Concierge is a first-class principal in ThunderID with its own credentials. It uses its own identity for browsing tools, and switches to a user-context token when a tool needs the consumer's consent.

Sample Architecture

Wayfinder runs as three deployable pieces. The Wayfinder Web browser app hosts the chat widget, the AI Agent drives the conversation, and the Wayfinder Server exposes booking data over MCP.

ThunderID sits alongside as the identity authority. It issues a user token on sign-in, an M2M token for the agent itself, and an on-behalf-of (OBO) token when the agent acts for the consumer. The Wayfinder Server also fetches ThunderID's JWKS to validate every incoming JWT.

Identity Model

The setup below creates a set of ThunderID resources. Here is what each one is and how it maps to Wayfinder concepts.

Organization

ThunderID can host many isolated tenants. Wayfinder needs only one, so everything lives in a single organization.

User Types

A user type defines who can exist in the system and what attributes they carry. Each user record belongs to exactly one user type. Wayfinder defines a Customer user type for the two demo consumers, John Doe and Jane Smith, with standard attributes like username, email, and name.

See User Types.

Resources and Permissions

The AI Agent API and the Wayfinder Server both need protection in the sample. The AI Agent API decides who is allowed to chat with the agent at all, and the Wayfinder Server decides who can book travel. Each is registered as a resource server, with its actions generating one permission per action.

A resource server groups the APIs of one backend. Each resource server defines one or more resources, each resource defines actions, and ThunderID automatically generates a permission of the form <resource_server>:<resource>:<action> for every action.

wayfinder-agent                         (Resource Server)
└── agent                               (Resource)
    └── access     →  agent:access      (Permission)

wayfinder                               (Resource Server)
└── booking                             (Resource)
    ├── read       →  booking:read      (Permission)
    ├── create     →  booking:create
    ├── cancel     →  booking:cancel
    └── recommend  →  booking:recommend

Permissions are issued to the access tokens. See Resource Servers.

Roles

A role bundles permissions for a class of principal. A user's or agent's effective permissions are the union of permissions across their roles. Wayfinder defines three roles:

• Chat User: grants agent:access, the permission required to talk to the Wayfinder Concierge.
• Booking User: grants booking:read, booking:create, and booking:cancel for booking travel through the UI.
• Recommender: grants booking:recommend, the permission the Wayfinder Concierge needs to surface flight recommendations on its own.

John Doe carries both user roles; Jane Smith carries only Booking User. The Recommender role is assigned to the WAYFINDER-CONCIERGE agent, not to a user.

See Authorization.

Application

An application is the OAuth2 client that ThunderID issues tokens to. Wayfinder Web is registered as WAYFINDER, a public, PKCE-enforced browser client.

See Manage Applications.

Agent

An agent is a first-class non-human principal in ThunderID with its own credentials. The Wayfinder Concierge is registered as WAYFINDER-CONCIERGE, with two grants enabled:

• client_credentials: for the agent's own M2M token, used to call browsing tools.
• authorization_code (with PKCE): for the on-behalf-of flow, where the user consents and the agent calls mutating tools as the user.

See Manage Agents and Agent Authentication.

Flows

A flow is the sequence of steps a user moves through when signing in or granting consent. Wayfinder Web uses the bundled default-flow for sign-in. The agent uses a separate Wayfinder Agent Authentication Flow that drives the OBO consent screen.

See Build a Flow.

Set Up the Sample

Before running any walkthrough, set up the Wayfinder sample application. Two paths lead to the same end state:

Quick StartDownload the sample and import a pre-built configuration bundle into <ProductName />. Everything the walkthroughs need is created in one step.Go to Quick Start →

Configure It YourselfCreate the same resources step by step through the console and API. Use this path to understand how each piece is set up.Go to Configure It Yourself →

Walkthroughs

Once the sample is running, pick a walkthrough:

Protect the AgentGate access to the Wayfinder Concierge with a scope, and watch John get in while Jane is rejected.Go to Protect the Agent →

Acting on Its OwnWatch the Wayfinder Concierge use its own M2M token to call browsing tools, with no user consent required.Go to Acting on Its Own →

Acting on Behalf of a UserWatch the Wayfinder Concierge pause for John's consent and complete a booking with a delegated (OBO) token.Go to Acting on Behalf of a User →