Microsoft launched Agent 365, which is designed to be the control plane for native and third party AI agents, as the company aims to be a horizontal as well as vertical play. The other key theme is that Microsoft is arguing that the best way to incorporate AI agents into your business is to extend the infrastructure you already have.
At Ignite 2025, Microsoft positioned itself as a cure for AI agent sprawl, governance and security. In a blog post, President, Business & Industry Copilot at Microsoft Charles LaManna said the company is trying to solve an enterprise challenge: "How to manage and govern agents responsibly and at scale, without rebuilding the trusted systems they rely on."
LaManna argued that the best way to manage AI agents is the same way you manage people including the systems you're familiar with.
This theme is common among enterprise software vendors, which are adding Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers at a rapid clip and making the case that their platform can manage their native agents as well as third party digital workers. Microsoft's core advantage is that it doesn't have to convince enterprises that it can play the horizontal as well as the vertical and function-specific game.
Agent management and governance has been a big blocker for AI agent deployments at scale. Agent 365 is available through Microsoft's Frontier program, which gives customers early access to AI innovation.
According to Microsoft, Agent 365 does the following:
- Customers can secure, deploy and control AI agents across Microsoft platforms, open source frameworks and third party tools.
- Agent 365 will be an enabler across multiple Microsoft applications ranging from Word and Excel to Dynamics 365, Defender, Entra and Purview.
- Microsoft is provided unified observability across AI agent fleets via telemetry data, dashboards and alerts. IT leaders will be able to track every agent being built, used and bought.
- Agent 365 includes five core functions: Registry, Access Control, Visualization, Interop and Security.
Microsoft is leveraging its ecosystem to ensure Agent 365 can manage all agents including those from Adobe, Databricks, ServiceNow and SAP to name a few.
Agent 365 can be enabled in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
Constellation Research CEO R "Ray" Wang said:
"Customers seek a place to manage their agents and often start with the vendor with the largest footprint in their tech landscape. Agent 365 gives Microsoft users a place to start the process of registering, managing, securing, and orchestrating their agents. As organizations mature in their use of agents across end to end processes, they will then move to a cross-platform, multi-agentic model."
Agent 365 is clearly the headliner at Ignite, but Microsoft's Book of News is packed with database updates including Azure DocumentDB and Azure HorizonDB, a PostgreSQL cloud database now in private preview, Microsoft Dataverse integration across Microsoft Fabric and more. Microsoft Foundry will have a unified catalog of MCP tools to enrich agents. Microsoft also announced Fabric IQ, a unified semantic layer used in Power BI, across its platform. Foundry IQ is a next-gen retrieval augmented generation offering.
Simply put, nearly everything Microsoft announced at Ignite--even secure Edge browser updates, Windows features and .NET app modernization had a hook into AI agents. OK, Microsoft's launch of its next-gen CPU, Cobalt 200, didn't have a direct tie to AI agents, but you get the idea.
If you were to sum up Ignite in three words though it would be agents, agents, agents (preferably in the voice of Jan Brady). Microsoft's AI agents touch everything from personal productivity to process transformation to workforce augmentation.
- Microsoft Azure sees 40% revenue growth in Q1
- Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI worth $135 billion
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 expands sales AI agent roster
- Microsoft adds Anthropic models to Researcher, Copilot Studio
With Agent 365 as the control plane for agents, it's not surprising that Microsoft unveiled multiple agents across its platform. Microsoft is using Work IQ, its intelligence layer that powers Microsoft 365 Copilots and agents, to scale agents.
The company said Workforce Insights, People and Learning Agents are generally available. The Workforce Insights Agent provides managers with insights into how teams are doing. People Agent is designed to find people in an organization based on role, function or skill. Learning Agent specializes in microlearning, tips and curated courses.
Microsoft's Sales Development Agent, now available in the Frontier program, indicates where the company's AI agent strategy is headed. Sales Development Agent is autonomous and will search for, qualify and engage leads. The agent will also research prospects, create personalized outreach and follow up with the ability to hand off to a human.
Constellation Research saw a demo of Sales Development Agent and it was clear that it could alleviate multiple sales pain points.
Here's Microsoft's kitchen sink of agents launched at Ignite.
AI business and productivity agents powered by Work IQ
- Word Agent: Organizes complex information into clear documents such strategic plans and policy briefs.
- Excel Agent: Turns data into charts, summaries, and insights using built-in formulas and logic.
- PowerPoint Agent: Builds presentations with storytelling and visual structure with conversational interface.
- Sales Development Agent: A fully autonomous sales agent that will research, qualify, and engage leads to drive revenue growth.
- Workforce Insights Agent: Gives leaders and managers comprehensive real-time insights into their team across roles, tenure, and location to help make data-driven workforce decisions.
- People Agent: Helps users find people in their organization based on role, function, or skill and offers suggestions on how to connect with colleagues.
- Learning Agent: Delivers personalized microlearning experiences, tailored tips, and curated courses to help employees build role-specific and AI skills.
IT, admin and security agents across Microsoft 365
- Teams Admin Agent: Automates and streamlines administrative tasks in the Microsoft Teams admin center, such as meeting monitoring and user provisioning.
- SharePoint Admin Agent: Uses AI-driven insights and automation in the SharePoint admin center.
- Change Review Agent (in Intune): Analyzes change requests in context, checking for risks, conflicts, and compliance before deployment.
- Policy Configuration Agent (in Intune): Accelerates policy creation by capturing intent from uploaded documents or natural language requirements and mapping them to recommended settings.
- Device Offboarding Agent (in Intune): Uses activity signals to suggest which devices should be removed and streamlines offboarding.
- Conditional Access Optimization Agent (in Entra): Ensures the right protections are applied to the right users.
- Identity Risk Management Agent (in Entra): Investigates and remediates risky users with intelligent insights and recommendations.
- App Lifecycle Management Agent (in Entra): Automates discovery, onboarding, monitoring, and remediation of apps across the environment.
- Access Review Agent (in Entra): Streamlines user access and permissions reviews and quickly acts on recommendations with AI-powered insights.
- Data Security Posture Agent (in Purview): Helps admins proactively manage risk by discovering sensitive content, assessing posture gaps and improving policy hygiene.
- Data Security Alert Triage Agent (in Purview): Enables analysts to triage, prioritize, remediate critical alerts and automate incident response.
- Threat Hunting Agent (in Defender): Orchestrates full threat-hunting sessions through natural language, allowing analysts to ask questions and receive summarized answers with underlying KQL queries.
To help build these agents, Microsoft added a series of new tools in Microsoft Copilot Studio including:
- Agent evaluations, automated tests to measure performance across predefined scenarios and criteria. Admins and builders will have the ability to compare agent performance.
- Computer use to enable agents to automate tasks across apps and websites.
- Real-time monitoring during agent runs.
- Agents built in Copilot Studio will each get an Entra Agent ID.
- Agents created in Microsoft 365 will be able to create files and access context from Teams meetings, calendar data, directory information, OneNote and shared mailboxes.
More:
