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New Delhi: Microsoft launched Agent 365, which it touted as the first enterprise-tier roll control tower of the imminent onslaught of autonomous AI agents. At Microsoft Ignite 2025, the CEO Satya Nadella announced that the workplace will become a place of colleagues, not the copilot, and software agents will soon outnumber human workers in most companies. Agent 365 is aimed at ensuring that this future does not turn into an out-of-control zoo of rogue bots, shadow IT, and security nightmares.
The new platform broadens the same governance, identity, compliance, and analytics tools firms have been leveraging on people to the domain of always-on digital workers. Included as a native part of Microsoft 365, Azure, and the Power Platform, it provides the IT departments with a single pane of glass to explore, enrol, manage, observe, and dispose of all agents, whether generated in Copilot Studio, brought in through OpenAI, or purchased by partners such as SAP, ServiceNow, and Adobe.
Automatically, Agent 365 identifies all the agents running within a tenant, even the so-called shadow agents, which are spin-up agents that employees start without authorisation. Bots can be quarantined, approved and deleted with a single click once they are spotted. Admins allocate every agent a controlled identity in Microsoft Entra, establish fine-grained limits to access data through Purview, and implement runtime guardrails, which prevent prompt injection, too much tool usage, or an effort to exfiltrate sensitive files.
Microsoft Defender for Agents is a new workload of Defender that constantly searches for vulnerabilities and suspicious activity. It can immediately withdraw the credentials of a particular agent in case it behaves strangely combined with a real-time adaptive access policy. All of the actions are recorded indelibly to be audited by compliance but provide legal and risk personnel the same visibility as they require with human employees.
It presents a concept of Work IQ, a knowledge layer which links agents to internal wikis, SharePoint sites, team chats, and org charts. It is within this context that agents write reports in the right brand tone and draw in the right financial information to include in a presentation or even participate in a Teams meeting and take notes and follow up on action items without a human prompting on everything that needs to be done.
Any new creation still takes minutes to build an agent in Copilot Studio or Power Automate; however, each new creation now bypasses Agent 365 to be reviewed and apply policy. The SDKs and APIs provide the developers with the ability to bind third-party agents and inherit the Microsoft security and governance stack.
General availability Agent 365 is going into public preview in December 2025 and will be generally available in March 2026. The Frontier Microsoft program has been chosen by select customers who can implement it tenant-wide beginning this week. Pricing will not be announced in advance, but Microsoft confirmed that it would be a part of some Microsoft 365 E5 and new agent-ready SKUs.
With the pace of the race to roll out autonomous agents quickening, Microsoft is making a bet that the victors will not be the companies that have the smartest individual bot but rather those that can safely control the thousands of them. Under Agent 365, the software giant is setting its flag as the operating system of the agentic enterprise.
