Microsoft Launches Agent 365 to Manage AI Workforce as Companies Prepare for Billion-Agent Future

Microsoft's Agent 365 Tries to Be the AI Bot Boss

A new tool from Microsoft called Agent 365 is designed to help businesses control their growing collection of robotic helpers. Agent 365 is not a platform for making enterprise AI tools; it's a way to manage them, as if they were human employees. Companies using generative AI agents in their digital workplace can use Agent 365 to organize their growing sprawl of bots, keep tabs on how they're performing, and tweak their settings. The tool is rolling out today in Microsoft's early access program. Essentially, Microsoft created a trackable workspace for agents. "Tools that you use to manage people, devices and applications today, you'd want to extend them to run agents as well in the future," says Charles Lamanna, a president of business and industry for Microsoft's Copilot, its AI chatbot. Lamanna envisions a future where companies have many more agents performing labor than humans. For example, if a company has 100,000 employees, he sees them as using "half a million to a million agents," ranging in tasks from simple email organization to running the "whole procurement process" for a business. He claims Microsoft internally uses millions of agents. This army of bots, with permission to take actions inside a company's software and automate aspects of an employee's workflow, could quickly grow unwieldy to track. A lack of clear oversight could also open businesses up to security breaches. Agent 365 is a way to manage all your bots, whether those agents were built with Microsoft's tools or through a third-party platform. Agent 365's core feature is a registry of an organization's active agents all in one place, featuring specific identification numbers for each and details about how they are being used by employees. It's also where you can change the settings for agents and what aspects of a business's software each one has permission to access.

Microsoft's AI agents can decide what to code now - what that means

IQ services aim to give agents true context and understanding. At Microsoft Ignite 2025 Tuesday, the company is showcasing a wide range of capabilities that are moving into an all-in agentic AI future. In the companion article to this piece, I wrote about how Microsoft is moving the enterprise towards self-running, self-repairing platforms. But that's not the whole story. Also: How Microsoft's new plan for self-repairing data centers will transform IT roles That article talks about the operational side of autonomous agents, software that can now monitor, diagnose, and repair itself. But what about software creation? Ignite 2025 also contains announcements that reflect the future where software is assembled, extended, and evolved by autonomous AI agents. Basically, not only will AI agents help us code, they will also decide what to code and then build those solutions. Boom! Mind blown. Before we move on to the specific technologies Microsoft announced that makes this possible, I want to share a caution. I've been using agentic AI via Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex to code, and while the results are nothing short of fantastic, the process is messy as heck. Also: I've tested free vs. paid AI coding tools - here's which one I'd actually use For every working capability I get back from the AI, I've had to slog through five or 10 drafts where the AI misunderstood the assignments, outright lied about its ability to do what it claimed, ignored instructions, or went completely off the rails. No doubt the AI-assisted coding has helped me save time. But it also showcases that AI agents need rather extensive supervision. So the idea that perhaps AI agents will supervise other AI agents rings hollow. As we discuss these new capabilities of AI agents to assemble software tools on demand, keep in mind the ever-growing need for qualified human oversight. OK, now onto the announcements. This is weird, but work with me here for a minute. In American law (and this applies to other countries as well), corporations are considered legal persons because they have the rights and responsibilities of a natural person. The analogy isn't perfect, but it's worked well enough to keep lawyers in suits for a long time. Inside an organization, from an IT perspective, humans have always had a different management status than scripts, apps, routines, and other code. Humans are considered "users," and are tracked with unique identities, permissions, governance, observability, and lifecycle management. Now, here's the key phrase from Microsoft: "Microsoft Agent 365 will extend the infrastructure for managing users to agents -- helping organizations govern agents responsibly and at scale." Also: Microsoft's new AI agents create your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint projects now Essentially, Microsoft is turning agents into users, not just chunks of code. In terms of enabling agents to assemble code and deploy it, those agents will be acting as users who have done the same class of tasks historically. While continually executing software daemons have existed as server features for decades, this is something new. Cron jobs and other traditional continuously running software perform specific predefined deterministic tasks. But agents in this new Microsoft model are goal-driven rather than task-driven. They have intent, state, knowledge, and context. Unlike daemons that exist under a machine account, agents under Agent 365 will be enumerated, onboarded, offboarded, audited, and permission-scoped, not as cron jobs, but as what are essentially digital workers. To understand this next big swing, you need to understand Model Context Protocol (MCP). This is a standard protocol introduced by Anthropic just about a year ago, and it's game-changing. Basically, it's a standard way for AI LLMs and services (think Slack, Google Drive, PostgreSQL, etc.) to talk to each other. What makes this big is that each LLM or AI implementation doesn't have to construct a customized API-based connection to each service. As long as the LLM has MCP on its side and the service has MCP on its side, they can communicate. Plus, it's a two-way thing. In other words, the AI can initiate a request to the service. But services can also send prompts to the AIs and get back results. Via the standardized interface of MCP, AIs and services have become LEGO building blocks, where each can snap into the other. This totally supports our thesis of self-building tools. Because now that AIs have a mechanism to snap-click to services in a predictable way, agents can do so when they need to (subject to permissions, entitlements, and such). Also: What is Model Context Protocol? The emerging standard bridging AI and data, explained All that brings us back to Microsoft's announcement. Microsoft says Foundry will, "Enable developers to enrich agents with real-time business context, multimodal capabilities and custom business logic through a unified catalog of Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools built with security and governance in mind." That catalog contains a whopping 1,400 systems (like SAP, Salesforce, and HubSpot) right out of the gate. Microsoft is also providing MCP extensibility, where developers can enable any API or function to work as an MCP server through Foundry. Now, let's think back to the autonomous creation thesis we introduced at the beginning of this article. AI agents running on Microsoft environments won't be writing their own code from scratch. But they will be empowered to assemble tools from an ever-growing catalog of MCP servers. Essentially, Microsoft is providing a roadmap for AI agents to become mashup artists. Let's recap. Microsoft is making it possible for agents to be treated as people-like digital workers (as worrying and freaky as that sounds). Microsoft is also enabling agents to snap-assemble tools via MCP instead of coding APIs or coding everything from scratch. The next logical question becomes, "How can AI agents intelligently assemble solutions if they don't genuinely understand the business environment, the meaning of the data they see, or what happened last time?" That's where the next Microsoft announcement comes in. For agents to successfully build and deploy solutions to match defined intents, they can't treat each task like a brand new operation. Agents need shared context, semantic understanding, and long-term memory. Also: Microsoft is packing more AI into Windows, ready or not - here's what's new This is really powerful. Context answers questions like, "What is this for?" and "How does it fit with other things?" Memory answers questions like, "Has anyone tried this before?" and "Did that work?" Semantics answers questions like, "What does customer, invoice, priority, or owner actually mean in this company?" To solve this, Microsoft has introduced Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ. For the record, Work IQ is also the brand name for the makers of the IQ Vice, an enormously flexible and capable workshop tool. We're talking about a different thing here. Beyond cool workshop tools, here's what Microsoft's three new software tools do for the agentic build stack. Microsoft's IQ announcements are aimed at going beyond giving agents access to data. They're building a substrate that enables the shared organizational understanding required to make accurate, context-aware decisions. With Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ, Microsoft is signaling that future enterprise software won't simply execute. It will understand, adapt, and build in ways that previously required human involvement. I feel good. Don't you feel good? It's not like this is the start of Skynet or anything. Right? Right? So let's be clear. These announcements don't mean that full self-building agentic software environments exist today. But Microsoft is showing that it has identified the missing architectural ingredients, and most are available for preview. Undoubtedly, progress will be incremental, messy, and require considerable human supervision. But we're starting to see the roadmap showing how AI will transform enterprise IT environments going forward. Now it's your turn. Do you think Microsoft's move toward agent-driven software will change the way applications are built and operated inside organizations? Do you think agents assembling solutions from existing tools is a practical near-term step, or still more of a long-term aspiration? And what level of human oversight do you believe will be required as these systems mature? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Microsoft Agent 365 lets businesses manage AI agents like they do people

Microsoft is racing towards building an AI "agent factory" that lets businesses build and manage their own AI agents. While Microsoft was founded on the idea of being a software factory, it's quickly being transformed into an era where AI agents will increasingly take on more human work. Now, Microsoft is launching Agent 365 as a way for businesses to manage AI agents in the same way they do humans. "Agents are already changing how people work, and IDC predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028," says Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft. "Agent 365 is the control plane for agents, extending the infrastructure you trust to manage your people to agents." Agent 365 will help businesses deploy and organize AI agents securely, to ensure these new AI coworkers don't do anything unexpected. Agent 365 is effectively a framework that has dashboards to show how AI agents are operating, with telemetry and alerts. It allows businesses to register AI agents with Microsoft Entra registry, limit what they have access to, ensure they can integrate with Microsoft 365 apps, and protect against external and internal security threats. It will also embrace a broader ecosystem of AI agents from companies like Adobe, Nvidia, ServiceNow, Workday, and more. The dashboards inside Agent 365 will let admins see connections between agents, people, and data, as well as monitor how AI agents are behaving in real time. Microsoft is making Agent 365 available through Frontier, the company's early-access program for AI features. This early rollout is designed for IT admins to test scenarios for adopting and managing AI agents.

Ignite awash with agents as Microsoft triples down on AI

Event supposedly for IT pros doesn't have much to tell admins on the Windows front The Copilot company kicked off its Ignite shindig this week with AI, AI, and more AI. Oh, and a lot of agents. Microsoft's Book of News mentions the words "Copilot" almost 200 times and "agent" 400 times. As if to make clear that it really wasn't listening to user complaints that its relentless focus on AI technology was dinging its reputation, Microsoft showed off agents aplenty in San Francisco, but precious little to relieve pressure on administrators having to deal with yet another broken Windows update. While Ignite is aimed at IT professionals, there wasn't much to interest administrators on the Windows front. While sticking Ask Copilot on the Taskbar and building in support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) might make for some good demos, it won't help with the day-to-day challenges of managing a fleet of Windows devices. And we can imagine the horror with which admins will greet Agent Workspace on Windows, "an isolated, policy-controlled, and auditable environment where agents can interact with software much like humans do." Microsoft stated: "All agentic interactions involving MCP and computer-using agents will run in Agent Workspace, setting a new standard in enterprise security." Some genuinely useful tools are rolling out, however. Autopatch Update Readiness, which aims to show admins the state of devices, received a nod. Extra recovery options for Windows 11 are handy, but don't address the operating system's general stability (and there is an argument that if Windows were more resilient, it wouldn't need additional recovery options). Hardware acceleration for BitLocker "in new devices with supported hardware," while welcome, is of little help to the here and now. However, the arrival of Sysmon functionality in Windows will be useful for event and process tracking, so long as Microsoft doesn't do a "Task Manager" on the tool. But AI and agents are the stars of the show. Microsoft Agent 365 is designed to extend the infrastructure for managing users to agents. There are a lot of agents either in preview or generally available. Don't want humans chasing leads? There's the Sales Development Agent. How about reducing the human in Human Resources? There's the Workforce Insights, People, and Learning Agents for that. Other agents are turning up in SharePoint and Teams, allowing admins to "automate and streamline administrative tasks." The SharePoint Admin Agent will also address permissions sprawl, overshared content, and archiving and access adjustments. And then there are agents turning up in Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, designed to deal with tasks such as research or formatting. Other agents include arrivals in Security Copilot for change review, policy configuration, and device offboarding. Azure Copilot is also getting the agent treatment. Microsoft said: "The new, specialized agents will be able to help customers migrate, operate and continuously modernize workloads running anywhere for efficient end-to-end lifecycle management." Microsoft would insist that AI agents are there to improve productivity, but it isn't difficult to imagine some managers pondering where humans might be removed from the loop. Microsoft's messaging remains confused, with Copilot and agent repeatedly appearing in products (and their roadmaps). Users say they have been left struggling to work out what is preview and what is going to make it to production.

Microsoft launches tracker to manage autonomous AI in the workplace

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 18 (Reuters) - In Microsoft's (MSFT.O), opens new tab view, humans are not the only ones to manage in a workplace. Artificial intelligence needs a manager, too. The software maker on Tuesday announced Microsoft Agent 365, a program for its customers to track what it expects to be 1.3 billion agents automating office work by 2028. Agents are AI-powered programs that perform tasks on humans' behalf. Sign up here. Microsoft and other companies are actively marketing agent software. While some customers have successfully deployed these systems for code generation, others have struggled with implementation, fueling concerns about a market bubble. According to Microsoft, just like IT staff can see who is on a company's network and manage what resources they can access, its latest software aims to extend similar controls to supervising AI agents. The program lets IT personnel quarantine rogue agents while equipping authorized ones -- whether built on Microsoft or other software like Salesforce -- with a range of productivity tools and aiming to secure them from cyberattacks, said Microsoft. In an interview, Judson Althoff, the CEO of Microsoft's commercial business, said the product came out of requests from business leaders to get a handle on AI agents at work and measure their return on investment. "Take supply chain. You might have an inventory agent. You might have an out-of-stock agent," said Althoff. "Without this kind of a tool, understanding how those things compose in an overall process is really, really hard." Microsoft Agent 365 is available to license holders that sign up for an early access program. The company announced the news at the start of Microsoft Ignite, a technology conference in San Francisco. Other announcements included Work IQ, which lets companies build agents on top of the same intelligence and business data powering its AI called Microsoft 365 Copilot. Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Kenneth Li and Lisa Shumaker Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Microsoft unveils tool to help companies control, track AI agents

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft's commercial business and then mresident of Microsoft North America, speaks during We Day at KeyArena in Seattle on April 23, 2015. Microsoft made it easier for corporate workers to make AI agents that go off and do work. Now it's demonstrating a tool that IT specialists can use to see and manage those agents. The software, named Agent 365, provides a list of artificial intelligence agents inside companies' systems, even if they're from other companies, Microsoft announced Tuesday. The company will present the product to business leaders and information technology practitioners at its Ignite conference in San Francisco this week. "In the same way you provision an identity for a new employee or a contingent worker, you'll provision identity and access controls for your agents," Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft's commercial business, told CNBC in an interview. With Agent 365, administrators will be able to approve new agents, see which ones are becoming popular and find out how many hours of employee time they're saving each week. They'll also be able to spot security risks and block agents. End users will be able to analyze agents' activities. Following the ascent of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022, software companies have built AI agents capable of developing software, generating ads and performing other simple tasks. Traditional corporations have started buying in. Agents from Adobe, Cognition, Databricks, Glean, ServiceNow and Workday will automatically show up in Agent 365. The software will also display agents that customers have built with Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. Other companies that sell AI agents can integrate with Agent 365, said Ray Smith, vice president of autonomous agents at Microsoft. EY, one of the world's top accounting firms, had built an internal catalog of its AI agents, but has started implementing Agent 365 to gain more control, said Mark Luquire, a managing director for the company. Companies selling cybersecurity software recognize the complexity that might result from agents proliferating. Okta, which sells software for managing access for employees, said in September that it will bring out tools for discovering agents and tracking their activity. Customers enrolled in Microsoft's Frontier program for receiving early access to AI features can request to try Agent 365, Smith said. Microsoft has not finalized pricing.

Does your AI have an ID? Microsoft looks to document the digital workforce with new 'Agent 365'

Satya Nadella recently foreshadowed a major shift in the company's business -- saying the tech giant will increasingly build its products and infrastructure not just for human users, but for autonomous AI agents that operate as a new class of digital workers. "The way to think about the per-user business is not just per user, it's per agent," the Microsoft CEO said during his latest appearance on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast. At its Ignite conference this week, the company is starting to show what that means. Microsoft is unveiling a series of new products that give IT departments a way to manage and secure their new AI workforce, in much the same way as HR oversees human employees. The big announcement: Microsoft Agent 365, a new "control plane" that functions as a central management dashboard inside the Microsoft 365 Admin Center that IT teams already use. Its core function is to govern a company's entire AI workforce -- including agents from Microsoft and other companies -- by giving every agent a unique identification. This lets companies use their existing security systems to track what agents are doing, control what data they can access, and prevent them from being hacked or leaking sensitive information. Microsoft's approach addresses what has become a major headache for businesses in 2025: "Shadow AI," with employees turning to unmanaged AI tools at growing rates. It also represents a big opportunity for the tech industry, as tech giants look to grow revenue to match their massive infrastructure investments. The AI agent market is expanding rapidly, with Microsoft citing analyst estimates of 1.3 billion agents by 2028. Market research firms project the market will grow from around $7.8 billion in 2025 to over $50 billion by 2030. Google, Amazon, and Salesforce have all rolled out their own agentic platforms for corporate use -- Google with its Gemini Enterprise platform, Amazon with new Bedrock AgentCore tools for managing AI agents, and Salesforce with Agentforce 360 for customer-facing agents. Microsoft is making a series of announcements related to agents at Ignite, its conference for partners, developers, and customers, taking place this week in San Francisco. Other highlights: * A "fully autonomous" Sales Development Agent will research, qualify, and engage sales leads on its own, acting basically like a new member of the sales team. * Security Copilot agents in Microsoft's security tools will help IT teams automate tasks, like having an agent in Intune create a new security policy from a text prompt. * Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents will allow users to ask Copilot, via chat, to create a complete, high-quality document or presentation from scratch. * Windows is getting a new "Agent Workspace," a secure, separate environment on the PC where an agent can run complex tasks using its own ID, letting IT monitor its work. As a backbone for the announcements, Agent 365 leverages Microsoft's entrenched position in corporate identity and security systems. Instead of asking companies to adopt an entirely new platform, it's building AI agents into tools that many businesses already use. For example, in the Microsoft system, each agent gets its own identity inside Microsoft Entra, formerly Active Directory, the same system that handles employee logins and permissions. Microsoft is rolling out Agent 365 starting this week in preview through Frontier, its early-access program for its newest AI innovations. Pricing has not yet been announced.

Microsoft unveils tool to track AI agents across corporate networks

Why it matters: The new tool provides a way for security teams to keep an eye on agents -- including employees' unsanctioned creations -- as concerns mount about agents going rogue. Driving the news: Microsoft unveiled Agent 365, a dashboard that can track AI agents on a corporate network all in one spot, at its Ignite conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. * Agent 365 will be available within the Microsoft 365 admin center, the same place IT teams already manage users, apps and devices. * Agent 365 uses existing Microsoft products, including Defender, Purview and Entra, to detect threats like prompt injection, prevent oversharing of sensitive data, and enforce zero-trust principles for agents. The big picture: As companies and their employees start to embed AI agents into their workflows, security teams have to contend with serious issues around what data these agents can see and how much autonomy they have to both control and act on this information. * There have already been incidents of agents deleting live production systems and destroying user files while trying to reorganize them. * Developers and other employees are also bringing their own unsanctioned AI tools into the mix, creating additional headaches for security leaders trying to gain visibility into the scope and scale of these autonomous actors. * "Many of the threats that we've seen in the past for people -- like social engineering or data exfiltration -- all of those same threats still exist for agents," Charles Lamanna, president of business apps and agents at Microsoft, told Axios. "But agents are the most gullible entity that you'll ever meet." Between the lines: In the emerging autonomous world, some AI agents could get their own individual identities, including login credentials. Others could just be linked to existing employees' accounts. * This hybrid setup has created a slew of new questions for how security leaders can best monitor agents' activity, Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft Security, told Axios. * "All of this is happening against a background of a pretty sophisticated threat landscape," Jakkal said. "The question is: Is AI going to be our greatest ally, or is it going to be our greatest threat?" How it works: Agent 365 will allow administrators to see how many agents are roaming their systems, how many human employees are using these agents, and what permissions they each have. * The portal includes details about the number of agents that are live on corporate systems, how many were created just that week, and how many users are running those agents. * Admins can identify which agents are accessing which resources, flag agents with excessive permissions, and revoke risky access -- all within a unified dashboard. * The dashboard also flags risky agents, including those accessing unfamiliar data sources or showing suspicious behavior patterns. The intrigue: Agent 365 is not limited to Microsoft-built agents. It will also support agents from partners like Anthropic, SAP, OpenAI, Workday and others. What's next: Agent 365 rolls out today. Some features are available immediately to all customers, while others require enrollment in Microsoft's Frontier beta program.

Microsoft reveals Agent 365 - the new and (hopefully) easy way to get a handle on all these new AI agents at work

Microsoft has unveiled a host of new tools for businesses to get to grips with all their AI agents. At Microsoft Ignite 2025, the company launched Microsoft Agent 365 platform, which will make it easier for organizations to manage and hopefully grow their agent usage. "Microsoft Agent 365 will extend the infrastructure for managing users to agents -- helping organizations govern agents responsibly and at scale," the company said. Living in the Microsoft 365 admin center, the new platform will bring together the company's security tools (Defender, Entra and Purview) with popular office software apps such as Word, Excel and Outlook, to give agents the best chance to find the information they need, boosting productivity across the board. Agent 365 will give users a complete view of every agent in their organization, as well as what permissions and access they have, including the ability to manage and limit this. Users will also be able to see clearly what connections their agents have with their people and their data, and monitor agent behavior and performance in real time to assess their impact n your organization. Agents can then be given access to apps and data to help improve the human-agent workflow, with conenctions to Microsoft's new Work IQ platform to get even more context when needed. All this is secured with Microsoft's top security tools, protecting agents from the threats and vulnerabilities before they are ever affected, as well as warning of any agents which might leak or overshare data. Elsewhere at Ignite, the company announced a host of new agents for its top office software apps, as well as launching a preview of native support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Windows. This will make it easier for AI agents to connect with enterprise apps and tools, with developer also now able to make their apps easier to discover, and new agent connectors allowing access to system files and Windows settings such as network and Bluetooth. Finally, new agent workspaces will let agents interact safely and securely with software, carrying out their tasks without disturbing the human user.

Microsoft's Agent 365 shifts AI agents from sandbox tools to enterprise-grade infrastructure

Managing and maintaining AI systems remains a challenge for many enterprises, particularly with the potential for agentic sprawl to expose businesses to risky entry points. Microsoft entered the observability fray with the launch of Agent 365 during its annual Ignite conference Tuesday. It described Agent 365 as the control plane for AI agents, serving as an observability layer for enterprises running any agent. The company said the platform "delivers unified observability" through telemetry, dashboards, and alerts to track every agent in use. Agent 365 supports any agents, whether built on Microsoft's platforms or from third parties, including Adobe, Databricks, Cognition, and ServiceNow. "Agent 365 marks a new chapter in how organizations build, secure, and scale their agents. This is a shift from isolated experiments to enterprise readiness, where agents operate as part of a unified, governed, and productive system," said Microsoft's president of business apps and agents, Charles Lamanna, in a blog post. What enterprises get Microsoft 365 has five capabilities: registry, access control, visualization, interoperability, and security. The first step in beginning observability tasks in Microsoft 365 is to log the agents that may be present, which will serve as a single source of truth. The company calls this registry Entra. "This single registry tracks the agents for every relevant role within your organization -- IT, developers, security, and business leaders. And with the Agent Store, users can easily discover the right agents for their role and workflows directly within Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams," Microsoft said. Access Control would require agents to have a unique agent ID, allowing enterprise admins to limit access as needed. Organizations can set policies that agents must adhere to, and the tool can respond by blocking misbehaving agents. Agent 365 also offers a visual dashboard, allowing companies to see how their agents are connected, performance measurements, and task adherence. For enterprises already dealing with agent sprawl, Microsoft's approach stands out because it bundles what's usually a patchwork of add-on tools into a single, governed control plane. Most observability options today are either siloed features or separate platforms that add more complexity. Agent 365 treats agents as parts of the stack, giving IT and security teams unified oversight at a moment when that's becoming essential. Companies like DataDog, Dynatrace and Splunk offer observability services for AI systems. The startup Chronosphere released capabilities similar to observability, focusing on debugging issues, and Raindrop also introduced its own observability tools for performance. Google also began offering an observability dashboard on its AI Agent Builder. "As agents multiply in numbers and sophistication, companies face a new kind of challenge: how to manage and govern agents responsibly and at scale, without rebuilding the trusted systems they rely on," Lamanna said. "The clearest path forward is to manage agents the way you manage people, using the same infrastructure, apps, and protections that power your business today."

Data infrastructure for AI comes first at Microsoft Ignite - SiliconANGLE

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE's coverage of Microsoft Ignite Artificial intelligence is shifting from simple copilots to full-fledged agents embedded into every layer of one's data infrastructure. At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Microsoft Corp. laid out its AI roadmap, alongside partners Dell Technologies Inc., Oracle Corp. and other industry players. The event featured announcements for over 70 products, including Agent 365, a control plane for both Microsoft and outside agents. It will enable customers to manage AI agents within a familiar infrastructure while accessing all the governance that comes with Microsoft's platform. "When we look at entering the agentic AI era, we see that agents are evolving from assistance or copilots to really first-class participants in the enterprise workflows," said Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. "We're also seeing that complete AI lifecycles are really getting framed up, and we saw this at Ignite at the keynote." Nashawaty spoke with fellow analyst Rob Strechay as part of an AnalystANGLE segment during Microsoft Ignite, for an exclusive conversation on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed how agentic AI is impacting data infrastructure and enterprise security. (* Disclosure below.) Here's theCUBE's complete analyst insights segment: And here are three key insights you may have missed from Microsoft Ignite 2025: Microsoft's announcements reflect an industry-wide sentiment -- AI is nothing without its data. Fabric IQ, which is currently in preview, employs Microsoft's OneLake data lake to create a "live, connected view" of business entities and relationships, with the goal of giving AI agents more relevant context. "Microsoft was introducing zero-copy data interoperability, enabling organizations to really have data across partner data platforms and Fabric OneLake with no data movement," Strechay said. "They are looking to help companies with analytics, BI and AI workloads that can run on either platform." Microsoft has also partnered with Dell on Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure, a packaged solution that brings Dell's unstructured data product, OneFS, into Azure, allowing customers to provision Dell's file storage directly from the Azure portal. The product is designed with agentic AI in mind, providing high throughput and low-latency file for data-heavy industries such as life sciences. "We had an opportunity to just perform a traditional lift and shift and bring the OneFS operating system and platform to Azure, but we wanted to do more than that," said Karl Rautenstrauch, principal partner and engagement manager of Azure Storage at Microsoft, in an exclusive interview with theCUBE. "We've developed a deeply integrated solution that offers Azure-native provisioning, management, billing [and] monitoring." Dell and Microsoft's partnership doesn't stop there. Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure also makes Dell's cybersecurity offerings available on the Azure marketplace so that customers can find the "puzzle pieces" they need to make their data infrastructure resilient, according to Colm Keegan, senior consultant of product marketing at Dell. "The cloud, in many respects, is one giant sandbox," he told theCUBE. "You think of all the development work that goes on in the cloud; use that to your advantage. Spin up these workloads in the cloud, and then simulate a cyber event. Then see how good you are at recovery." Here's theCUBE's complete video interview with Karl Rautenstrauch and Dell's Rachna Lalwani: And the complete video interview with Colm Keegan: AI is spurring a move back toward on-premises and hybrid solutions, with customers seeking options for private AI -- AI built on proprietary company data -- and AI on the edge, including on-device AI applications. Another Dell-Microsoft collaboration is Dell Copilot+ PCs, built on Microsoft's Copilot+ PC architecture, which blends Microsoft's cloud-enabled Copilot+ capabilities with on-device intelligence. These Copilot+ PCs are designed to accelerate AI workflows in a hybrid setting. "Dell views the AI world as hybrid," said Isaac Piñon, director of product marketing, B2B solutions and software, at Dell. "A combination of cloud, on-prem and edge, all the way down to the PC. The next generation of applications are all being written for the NPU-enabled machines. There are some ISVs and partners that we work with today that are already using them. Dell Copilot+ PCs are the perfect choice for future proofing your AI PC investments, and it becomes the new standard for every day, on-device AI applications." Dell's Copilot PCs listen and react to users in real time, using voice or context-aware visual intelligence to decode their surroundings. This type of on-device AI is particularly important for data-sensitive industries that prefer not to send confidential data to the cloud and instead keep it within a proprietary data infrastructure. "You've got Copilot Voice, which makes interacting with your AI PC as easy as speaking to it," Piñon said. "There's also Copilot Vision, which offers guidance based on what you see on your screen. You've got these Copilot+ experiences that help you work on productivity -- so, features like Recall and Click to Do, which streamline your workflow." Dell and Microsoft are also restructuring the private cloud to meet enterprise AI standards with Azure Local and Azure Arc, which bring Azure's security and operating model into private environments. Dell customers can even plug in PowerStore and adopt Azure Local without purchasing new hardware, a huge cost-saving option. "The solutions that we provide have to meet the customer's needs around flexibility and scale, allowing them to grow and shrink as necessary and scale up and scale down," said Matt McSpirit (pictured, left), senior principal engineering technologist at Dell. "It's a complex set of challenges that we're looking to address with some great infrastructure solutions." Here's theCUBE's complete video interview with Isaac Piñon: Dell's not the only partner reshaping data infrastructure with Microsoft. Oracle recently released Oracle Database@Azure and Oracle AI Database, AI-powered data solutions that merge Azure's scalable cloud ecosystem with Oracle's high-performance data management. The fusion of Oracle Database and Microsoft Azure allows customers to apply Azure's AI capabilities to the data already stored in Oracle. "We're super committed to getting customers to be able to use the Oracle Database everywhere," said Nathan Thomas, vice president of product management at Oracle. "We started with Microsoft over three years ago as our first multicloud partner through the Oracle Database@Azure offering, but that really provides the Oracle AI Database and Oracle Exadata on OCI in Microsoft data. We've had a great opportunity to support our joint customers by building out that infrastructure." Strengthening your data infrastructure is essential for operationalizing your data at scale, according to Thomas. If customers want to develop enterprise-ready AI applications, then integrating their data is the first step. "We're talking to a lot of people who are looking to migrate and modernize their Oracle Database workloads into Microsoft Azure, and of course, the solution that we've built together really is critical for that," he said. "Our solutions help play a role in really helping customers start to take advantage of AI by enabling them to use the Oracle AI Databases that have all of their most important private corporate data in them." Microsoft's collaboration with Oracle reflects its larger strategy around agentic AI. Ignite's keynote highlighted the importance of data and lifecycle management for getting AI applications into production, according to Nashawaty: "It reinforced Microsoft's AI lifecycle management and messaging along from AI pilots into production. We're seeing in our own CUBE Research ... that 51% of applications that are going into production are using AI today." Here's theCUBE's complete video interview with Nathan Thomas:

Agentic AI reshapes Microsoft cloud strategy - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft deepens cloud integration as agentic AI drives the next platform shift: theCUBE analysis Artificial intelligence is hitting an inflection point as agentic AI pushes beyond copilots and into the core machinery of enterprise operations. What used to be simple assistance is evolving into a distributed network of agents that need consistent data access, deterministic behavior and deeper security baked into every layer. The pressure is on: Companies must harmonize identity, observability and lifecycle governance while preparing for systems that think, respond and coordinate in real time. It's a dramatic shift that's reshaping expectations for how modern platforms should actually work, according to Paul Nashawaty (pictured, right), principal analyst at theCUBE Research. "When we look at entering the agentic AI era, we see that agents are evolving from assistance or copilots to really first-class participants in the enterprise workflows," Nashawaty said. "We're also seeing that complete AI lifecycles are really getting framed up, and we saw this at Ignite at the keynote." Nashawaty spoke with fellow analyst Rob Strechay (left) as part of an AnalystANGLE during Microsoft Ignite, for an exclusive conversation on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed how Microsoft Corp. is advancing agentic AI through unified data, lifecycle tooling, security foundations and next-generation productivity agents. (* Disclosure below.) Organizations are rapidly adopting tools that unify data, identity and operational telemetry as agents take on more autonomous responsibilities. This shift is driving demand for platforms that handle everything from lifecycle governance to real-time observability while reducing fragmentation across productivity, data and security layers, Nashawaty noted. He pointed to the Ignite keynote as a clear example of that momentum, saying, "It reinforced Microsoft's AI lifecycle management and messaging along from AI pilots into production. We're seeing in our own CUBE Research ... that 51% of applications that are going into production are using AI today." At the same time, data infrastructure is becoming a competitive battleground for agentic AI, especially as companies aim to eliminate redundant pipelines and avoid recreating data across multiple environments. Enterprise teams are prioritizing open formats, zero-copy interoperability and consistent metadata to maintain trust and reduce operational drag. These trends are fundamentally reshaping how organizations build intelligence layers atop increasingly complex data estates, according to Strechay. "Microsoft was introducing zero-copy data interoperability, enabling organizations to really have data across partner data platforms and Fabric OneLake with no data movement, which is really huge to them," he said. "Again, they are looking to help companies with analytics, BI and AI workloads that can run on either platform." Security is emerging as one of the most consequential layers in the agentic AI landscape, with autonomous defenses and identity-aware controls running across cloud, data and collaboration systems. Enterprises are embedding guardrails directly into workflows to prevent drift, oversharing and permission sprawl as both human and machine identities grow more intertwined. This reinforces the critical need for security architectures that evolve alongside agentic behavior, according to Nashawaty. "Security as a primitive ... ambient and autonomous security is built into every layer," he explained. "You start at silicon, which is the hardware and move to the operating system, move to identity management, that could be human identity, machine identity, non-human identity, cloud, data, apps and agents. All of this is a big part of the security angle." Agentic AI is also redefining productivity experiences, extending beyond traditional chat interfaces into workflow execution, multi-step orchestration and domain-specific agents. Companies are increasingly adopting agents that can act on a user's behalf in context-rich environments, reducing friction and expanding access to AI-powered workflows across the organization, Strechay emphasized. "These agents weren't just about asking questions and being chatbots, they actually can act on your behalf as well," he said. "They're also a new pattern where customers could really use chat to drive multi-step AI-powered workflows and they're calling this agent mode." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Microsoft Ignite:

Microsoft introduces Agent 365 control center and a pack of new AI agents for enterprise users - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft introduces Agent 365 control center and a pack of new AI agents for enterprise users Microsoft Corp. is leaning more into enterprise artificial intelligence agentic workflow support with a new command center for AI agents: Agent 365. Announced today during Microsoft Ignite 2025 in San Francisco, Agent 365 provides centralized visibility and management for AI agents across an enterprise. It acts as a control plane that brings together telemetry, dashboards and alerts into one place. "As agents multiply in numbers and sophistication, companies face a new kind of challenge: how to manage and govern agents responsibly and at scale, without rebuilding the trusted systems they rely on," said Charles Lamanna, president of business apps and agents at Microsoft. He added that the best way to manage agents in the enterprise is the same way management handles people. To tackle the problem, Agent 365 brings together five core elements: registration, access control, visualization, interoperability and security. Building on Microsoft Entra, a comprehensive family of identity and access management products, information technology teams gain a single source of truth for every agent operating in their organization. It provides a single registry to track all agents and their relevant roles across the enterprise: information technology , development, security and business operations. All agents in the system are required to have an agent ID, which allows them to manage and limit access similar to how user roles are handled. IT can pre-program guardrails for creating, onboarding and managing agents. Policy settings in Entra will enforce adaptive, risk-based roles that respond in real time to context and risk, allowing rogue agents to be detected and curtailed. On the front end, users will get a visual dashboard filled with advanced analytics to provide a map of connections between agents, users and resources in use. This allows engineers and IT teams to dive into tailored metrics to understand how the complex web of software and people works together. It includes agent metrics for performance, speed and quality alongside detailed logging, reporting and discovery to assist with detecting and logging agent interactions for security and ethics audits. The company said the new control center is agent supplier-agnostic and will work with agents built using Microsoft platforms, open-source frameworks or third-party platforms across Azure and partner clouds. All of this is designed to work together with Microsoft Defender, the company's cybersecurity solution, and Purview, a unified data governance and compliance platform that provides visibility and control for both agents and data. Purview handles potential AI-related data exposure risks and prevents agents from processing sensitive information by applying policy settings. Defender allows organizations to detect and prevent known exploits and emerging threats that target agents and Entra acts to stop attacks in real-time. Managing and securing Copilot As more users adopt Copilot, organizations find themselves needing to monitor and secure its use. To this end, Microsoft released Baseline Security Mode today in general availability. This helps organizations secure their Microsoft 365 environment using recommended configurations. After a guided experience, IT and security teams can identify gaps in policy, simulate changes and deploy protections for common Microsoft apps, including Office, SharePoint, Teams, Entra and more. The company also released an additional Agent Dashboard. In preview mode, the dashboard offers centralized reporting on agent adoption across an organization. IT and leadership can use it to analyze trends, group adoption and highlight individual agent actions. The goal is to enable organizational administration and management to understand adoption, aiding in decision-making regarding governance and impact. Purview has been updated with Data Loss Prevention for Microsoft 365 Copilot, now in preview, which helps ensure that sensitive information stays protected. If a prompt sent to Copilot includes confidential or sensitive information -- such as credit card details or personal data -- the new prompt protection blocks Copilot and agents from responding, preventing the data from being used for grounding or web search. Also in preview, Purview Data Security Posture Management for SharePoint can now assist IT administrators in discovering and fixing links that are shared too widely at scale, reducing potential exposure of sensitive information. Purview AI Observability in DSPM, also in preview, will allow IT admins to see everything happening with agents and help security teams make informed decisions to mitigate risks. New agents for business users and IT admins Along with the agent control center with Agent 365, Microsoft introduced several new AI agents to assist employees in scaling and using their knowledge. Work IQ is the intelligence layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot, the AI chatbot tool integrated into Microsoft products, and the company's AI agents. Tapping into Work IQ, Microsoft released three new agents designed to simplify workforce management, assist with upskilling and strengthen employee connections. These new agents include a Workforce Insights Agent designed to provide management with real-time insights into workforce roles, tenure and location to enable data-driven team planning decisions. The new People Agent helps users find the appropriate person to connect with, given their role or skill, based on previous interactions, helping connect employees. The Learning Agent will provide personalized micro-lessons, tips and curated courses to help employees build their skills and AI literacy. Sales teams will get access to the Sales Development Agent, new in preview. This agent acts as a fully autonomous sales agent, capable of doing research, qualifying and engaging leads during after-hours to provide additional coverage for salespeople. It can research prospects, reach out to them, and follow up without immediate human oversight. However, it will still transfer leads to human workers when it cannot handle a question or encounters an issue. In Teams, the company's collaboration platform that combines chat, video meetings and file sharing, a new Teams Admin Agent, now in preview, can help automate tedious recurring tasks. It will be able to securely execute tasks in Teams, such as meeting monitoring or managing user accounts. A new SharePoint Admin Agent, now in preview within the collaboration platform, will provide IT administrators with AI-driven insights and automation capabilities. Microsoft said it will assist with monitoring inactive and ownerless sites, track overshared content and permission-sprawl, and implement policies to archive or lock down roles as needed. Admin teams can also use it to better understand increasing AI agent usage as Copilot adoption accelerates.

Microsoft leans hard on autonomous security for AI agents - SiliconANGLE

Artificial intelligence-enabled agents are taking the enterprise by storm, and the level of autonomy they introduce brings some serious security challenges that Microsoft Corp. is doing its best to address. At Microsoft Ignite today, the company announced a swathe of updates across platforms including Microsoft Defender, Entra, Intune, Purview and Sentinel, designed to help enterprises observe, secure and govern agentic AI at scale. In a blog post, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Security Vasu Jakkal said information technology leaders have a lot of urgent questions regarding agentic AI: "How do we onboard, manage and govern these agents? How do we protect the data they access and create? How do we protect them from threats? How do we monitor them to ensure their trustworthiness, and ensure they are not double agents? And how can we leverage agents to protect, defend, and respond at the speed of AI?" The answer, according to Jakkal, is to make security just as ambient and autonomous as the AI agents it's trying to protect, weaving it into every aspect of the enterprise technology stack, from the silicon to the operating system to the apps, data and platforms. Securing the agent estate It starts with the new Microsoft Agent 365, which is described as a "control plane for AI agents," bringing enhanced observability to every level of the AI stack. It's a new kind of security agent that's meant to help teams observe, manage and govern every new agent they create, designed to address the problem of agentic sprawl. Microsoft Agent 365 offers several useful capabilities, including a Registry that acts as a complete inventory of all AI agents up and running inside an organization. The registry divides these agents into categories, including those with Microsoft Entra identities, those that register themselves and also "shadow agents" that warrant extra special attention. Using the registry, IT admins can quarantine any sanctioned agent to prevent them from being discovered by, or connecting to other agents. Other capabilities in Microsoft Agent 365 include controls for governing the data resources and tools agents can access, and a unified dashboard for visualizing them. According to Jakkal, it provides a complete map of all of the connections between agents and their users and other agents they're collaborating with, along with role-based reporting and analytics to show what they're doing. This allows security teams proactively to assess their posture and risk, detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, shadow agents and other risks, and do something about them. Alongside Microsoft Agent 365, the company introduced a host of other tools for governing and securing AI agents at scale. For instance, the Microsoft Foundry Control Plane is for building, managing and securing fleets of AI agents at scale, while the Microsoft Security Dashboard for AI provides insights into the risks of agents by aggregating signals from platforms including Microsoft Defender, Entra and Purview into a single dashboard. With this, teams can share unified security controls, policies and real-time risk insights, Jakkal said, in order to manage agents across their entire technology estates. Purview, meanwhile, is getting expanded data security and compliance controls for Microsoft 365 Copilot to prevent employees from accidentally sharing sensitive data with the popular chatbot. Securing platforms and clouds To secure the second layer of the stack, Microsoft is making some big changes to the platforms and clouds that AI agents run on. The new integration between Microsoft Defender and GitHub Advanced Security is one of the most important updates here. It enables developers and security teams to collaborate on securing code and infrastructure using familiar tools. For instance, security teams can now recommend actions developers should take to fix vulnerable code, and then they'll be able to use Copilot Autofix to implement those recommendations. These fixes will then be validated in Microsoft Defender, Jakkal said. To protect against AI attacks that exploit legacy configurations, Microsoft announced the general availability of Baseline Security Mode, which uses recommended security settings to try and mitigate this risk and improve organization's overall cloud posture. It offers a "guided admin experience" that makes it possible to identify gaps and simulate changes with "what if" scenario analysis, and then deploy broad protections that aim to minimize disruption to mission-critical workloads. Microsoft is also beefing up protection for the Windows operating system, which is one of the main environments where productivity agents operate. It's doing so with new features in Microsoft Intune, such as phased deployments that will simplify the rollout of new agents and AI applications, allowing users to validate security before scaling. It also introduces "maintenance windows," which give admins more precise control over the timing of updates to the OS itself, drivers and firmware. Among the most exciting additions for security teams will be the new Microsoft Security Copilot agents in Microsoft Sentinel. The company said its goal is to empower every security professional with intelligent "AI partners" that will amplify their expertise to transform the fabric of organizational security. To that end, it's launching more than a dozen new Security Copilot agents in platforms including Defender, Entra, Intune and Purview. The goal is to empower companies to take a more proactive stance to security, instead of a reactive one. Microsoft said the new agents are highly adaptive and designed to work alongside human security experts, helping them to triage incidents, optimize conditional access policies, surface threat intelligence and maintain secure and compliant endpoints. There are also 34 new Security Copilot agents from Microsoft's partner community to aid in this. As for Microsoft Defender, it's getting a new predictive shielding function that allows it to step up its attempts to disrupt cyberattacks. Jakkal said it works by anticipating an attacker's movements so as to harden the most likely attack pathways they'll pursue and protect critical assets. Its forecasts are based on graph insights and threat intelligence from more than 100 trillion signals the company analyzes each day. Once an attack pathway is predicted, it'll take actions to prevent the attacker from exploiting adjacent resources. Last but not least, the company announced an entirely new offering called the Defender Experts Suite, which gives organizations access to the full capabilities of the Defender platform, as well as direct access to a designated Microsoft security expert. The idea is that security pros can work hand-in-hand with Microsoft's experts to create a more resilient cyber defense and response strategy, the company said.

Microsoft rolls out major updates for building and managing enterprise AI agents - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft rolls out major updates for building and managing enterprise AI agents Microsoft Corp. is using its massive Ignite conference in San Francisco today to unveil a wide range of updates to its Foundry artificial intelligence development platform aimed at simplifying how developers build, deploy and manage AI agents. The previews and general releases are part of the company's broader effort to streamline agent development and enable enterprises to integrate AI more deeply into business applications. They include expanded support for the Model Context Protocol, agent interoperability, model optimization and a unified context layer designed to give agents a more complete understanding of enterprise data. Collectively, Microsoft said the enhancements will enable developers to enrich agents with real-time business context, bundle in multimodal capabilities and incorporate custom business logic through a catalog of MCP tools. MCP catalog Developers can use the catalog to locate and manage public or private MCP tools from a single interface. It's also intended to provide deeper integration with business systems. Logic Apps connectors provide access to more than 1,400 systems, including applications from SAP SE, Salesforce Inc., and HubSpot Inc., exposed via MCP. That allows agents to interact with real-time business data and events without requiring custom integration work. The updates also add new tools for transcription, translation, voice and intelligent document processing. Developers will be able to expose any application programming interface or function as an MCP tool through API management, enabling the reuse of existing business logic. Foundry now includes a preview of a model router that automatically selects the best model for a given task. It's designed to optimize performance and cost by analyzing prompts and selecting the most suitable language model. Microsoft said the result is up to 40% faster response times and 50% lower cost. The router currently includes access to 12 models, including the Open AI LLC's GPT-4.1 and GPT-5, GPT-oss-120b, DeepSeek-v3.1, Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8, Llama-33-70B-Instruct and X.ai Corp.'s Grok-4 and Grok-4-fast. Foundry Agent Service is adding a set of preview features intended to simplify the deployment of hosted agents, built-in memory and support for multi-agent workflows. Hosted agents allow developers to deploy custom agents without managing containers or infrastructure. Microsoft said the service will provide autoscaling, observability and identity integration to help move prototypes into production. The company noted that developers using frameworks such as Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, CrewAI's commercial framework or OpenAI Agents Software Development Kit can use the same runtime environment. Agents in concert Multi-agent workflows coordinate multiple specialized agents to perform multi-step processes such as onboarding or financial approvals. Microsoft said workflows will support long-running, stateful interaction and include recovery and debugging features. The memory feature, coming later this year, will enable agents to retain context and conversation history across sessions, providing persistent recall without requiring external data stores. Microsoft is also introducing a context layer that combines intelligence from Microsoft 365 Copilot with a new semantic layer and Foundry IQ for retireval-augmented generation. The company said its goal is to give agents a unified understanding of user actions, business data definitions and information location. Fabric IQ, now in preview, extends the semantic layer used in Microsoft Power BI to operational systems, creating what Microsoft calls a "live, connected view" of business entities and relationships. This is meant to allow agents and applications to act on more contextually relevant information. Fabric IQ employs Microsoft's OneLake data lake, enabling organizations to leverage models across on-premises, hybrid and multicloud environments. Streamlined RAG Foundry IQ, also in preview, is a managed knowledge system that supports RAG across multiple data sources, including Azure data services, Microsoft 365 SharePoint, Fabric IQ and the web. Built on Azure AI Search, it automates multimodal data pipelines and performs agentic retrieval operations such as query planning, iterative search, reflection and synthesis. Integration with Microsoft Purview provides for governance and compliance. The new Foundry Control Plane, now in preview, extends Agent 365 to provide visibility, control and security for agents deployed in the Microsoft cloud. It includes management features such as observability, guardrails and lifecycle tools. Microsoft said the Control Plane gives teams a unified view of agents operating across Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Entra, Copilot Studio and external platforms. Observability capabilities including real-time tracing, continuous monitoring, evaluations and red teaming are now available. Agent control policies, identity and access controls using Microsoft's Entra Agent ID cloud identity management platform, and integrations with Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview are available in preview. The Control Plane also provides cost and usage management through the AI Gateway, enabling centralized usage limits and cost controls for models, agents and MCP tools.