Most identity deployments begin with a long setup project. C1's begins with a question: what are you trying to get done first?
Ask anyone who has rolled out an identity governance platform and you'll hear a version of the same story. Weeks of scoping before anything runs. Connector after connector. Attribute mapping that stalls because no one can agree on the source of truth. The tool arrives eventually, but the value shows up much later, if the project keeps its momentum at all.
C1 takes a different starting point. Rather than just a long list of standard to-dos, you tell C1 AI what your goals are, and it builds the path for you.
There's a principle underneath the flow: the safe path should also be the easy one. C1 stands up governance first, then layers AI access and agents on that foundation. Governing your people is what makes governing your agents possible, so onboarding does them in that order and gets you to a working result fast.
Start with a goal# #
You choose a goal when you begin. Say it's audit remediation. C1 doesn't drop you onto a blank configuration screen. Our agentic onboarding with C1 AI tells you the first thing that matters: connect your directory. When you do, it detects your identity provider and pre-fills it, then reads what's already there, including who reports to whom and each person's employment status. That's the information auditors ask for first, and you didn't have to re-enter any of it.
From there, C1 AI tracks your progress a step at a time. Map profile attributes. Connect apps. Each step is scoped to the goal you picked, not to a generic wizard that treats every customer the same.
## Receive a plan based on your live environment[#](#receive-a-plan-based-on-your-live-environment)
C1 AI gives you a plan built from what it found in your tenant, not a template. It detected a GitHub app, so it proposes running an access review over it and notes the scope is small enough to finish in one pass. It found that only one user has a manager set, so it flags manager coverage, because reviews route to managers and that gap would break the routing. It lines up the findings auditors reach for next: access still active for departed users, privileged GitHub access to confirm, department and job title to map.
The plan groups into audit evidence, close findings, and stay clean, so the work reads as a path to your goal rather than a pile of settings. You work the list and mark items done as you go, with the next step always in front of you. If you like, it can even do the work for you and just have you validate when it's done. If you are ever unsure, ask a question and C1 AI can clarify along the way. This is a true agentic experience, not just a checklist.
Let the agents do the setup work# #
This is where onboarding stops feeling like configuration. When your plan calls for an access review, a campaign agent runs it from inside onboarding and drafts the campaign for you. You review the draft, approve it, and it goes. The agent does the assembly. You keep the decision.
That pattern holds across the experience. Some tasks in your plan are agent-assisted, which means C1 AI automatically executes them directly once you give the go-ahead. Every action stays gated on your approval, so the speed of an agent never costs you control over what happens in your environment.
The safe path and the fast path turn out to be the same path.
Govern your people first, then your agents# #
Identity isn't only people anymore, and the number of AI agents acting inside your systems keeps climbing. C1 governs them in the order that keeps governance sound: people before agents. You can't govern what an agent can reach until you've governed what your users can reach, so onboarding starts with your directory and your users and treats AI access as the layer built on top.
When you're ready, C1 AI uses AI Access Management to turn on AI connections, finds the MCP servers your connected apps host, and walks you through the tools each one exposes before anything can use them. Your governance defaults apply to every MCP server in the tenant: approval is required before a discovered tool can be used, and new tools default to a sensitive classification. Agent access is governed from the first day, on the same foundation you just built for people.
Powered by C1 Autonomous Worker# #
C1 AI goes beyond just onboarding and can complete a variety of tasks. For example, ask for a report on your access, who holds what and where the risk concentrates, and it returns charts and cards rather than a wall of rows.
This and the agentic onboarding work are powered by C1 Autonomous Worker, or C1AW: an autonomous agent built to take a multi-step job from ask to done across your real systems. It plans the work, acts through the tools and data C1 has connected, and runs under the user's permissions, with sensitive changes routed back for approval. Underneath each one is a lineage trail: the path the agent took to reach the answer, down to the specific app and user records it read. You can audit the reasoning, which is the part most tools ask you to take on faith.
Why this matters for the person signing off# #
The hard part of identity governance was never the software. It was the distance between buying it and getting anything out of it. C1 closes that distance by making the first thing you do a step toward an outcome you already care about.
A recent customer made that distance almost disappear: after going live with C1, they used the C1 AI onboarding agent, out-of-the-box integrations, and AI connector builder to set up more than 150 apps in two days. That is what time to value looks like when the product is opinionated, the integrations just work, and the agentic integration platform can carry the setup with you. It is not a slightly faster implementation cycle. It is a different category of speed.
You see a real result early, a signed-off access review, instead of waiting out a long setup cycle before anything useful happens. You start with a goal, connect a directory, and let the agents carry the setup. The fast path and the governed path are one and the same.
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