Enabling User-Specific Memory and Session Management for an Agent Invoked via native Agent Space interface

[mscdw]

Problem Statement: Enabling User-Specific Memory and Session Management for an Agent Invoked via Agent Space

Context
Our application's core intelligence is powered by an agent running on Agent Engine. This agent is designed to be stateful and personalized, relying on two critical features:
Session Management: To maintain context within a single, multi-turn conversation.
Memory Bank: To store and retrieve long-term user preferences, history, and information across multiple sessions.
Both of these features are fundamentally dependent on receiving a stable and unique User ID for each invocation. In our previous deployment on Cloud Run, a standard authentication flow successfully provided this User ID, allowing the agent to function as intended.
The Core Issue
We are now integrating our agent with the native Agent Space interface. This new invocation path does not include a user authentication flow or pass any persistent user identifier to our backend agent on Agent Engine.
As a result, every request from Agent Space is anonymous and isolated. Our agent has no mechanism to identify the user, link consecutive requests into a session, or access that user's specific data in the Memory Bank.
Impact
This lack of user identification has a critical impact on our application's functionality and user experience:
Loss of Intelligence: The agent becomes stateless and "amnesiac." It cannot recall previous turns in the conversation, rendering complex, multi-step tasks impossible.
No Personalization: The Memory Bank is rendered unusable. The agent cannot access saved user preferences, history, or custom instructions, creating a generic and unintelligent experience for the user.
Degraded User Experience: Users lose the primary benefit of a sophisticated agent—its ability to learn and adapt to them over time. This severely diminishes the value proposition of our application.
The Central Question / Challenge
How can we establish a persistent user identity and manage conversational sessions for our agent when it is invoked through the native Agent Space interface, which currently appears to provide no user context?