Agents unlock their full potential when they can run tools on behalf of users, turning complex workflows into simple, automated actions. By offloading repetitive or low‑critical tasks to autonomous agents, users become more productive while the agents invoke the right tools at the right time.

Niklas Heidloff

A walkthrough of implementing OAuth-based user authentication for agentic tools in IBM watsonx Orchestrate. The post demonstrates a complete OAuth authorization code flow where an AI agent books flights by reading user preferences from a secured external service on behalf of the authenticated user. Includes a working local example with an OAuth server, a TypeScript preferences service, and Python tools imported into watsonx Orchestrate, with full code snippets covering token validation middleware, REST endpoint protection, and how the Orchestrate tool retrieves the OAuth access token from the connections context.

Running agentic Tools on behalf of Users in watsonx