Ignite 2025: Microsoft prepares customers to scale AI agent vision with Agent 365

Microsoft has confirmed the launch of Agent 365, a control plane for deploying, organizing, and governing agents in an organization, whether created on Microsoft platforms or elsewhere. 

A key benefit of Agent 365 will be universal observability of an “agent fleet”, wrote Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's President of Business Apps and Agents, for the announcement around Ignite 2025. Agent 365 will track agents being built, imported, and used in an organization, with a focus on registration, access control, visualization, interoperability, and security.

Agent 365 already has an ecosystem, Lamanna noted. Microsoft-native agents like their pre-built agents and those built with Copilot Studio or Foundry can be part of Agent 365. And agents from partners like LexisNexis, ServiceNow, Adobe, Box, NVIDIA, ZenDesk, and Databricks will align. It will also support open-source agents published on GitHub for Anthropic, Crew.ai, Cursor, LangChain, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Vercel.

Agent 365 will align with a broader set of cloud services Microsoft announced at Ignite 2025: 

• Microsoft Entra registry for managing agent inventories with an Entra agent ID
• Agent Store where users can discover agents from within M365 Copilot or Teams
• Work IQ, “the intelligence layer powering Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents”, which is gaining enhancements in Copilot and SharePoint.
• Multiple build paths: Agent 365 will work for teams using Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Agent Framework, or the Agent 365 SDK
• Microsoft Purview will work with Entra to block attacks, set protections, and provide visibility into AI-related data exposure risks.
• Microsoft 365 Admin Center will provide a starting point for IT teams.
• Unified posture management and threat protection for AI agents in Microsoft Defender are available in preview as a part of Microsoft Agent 365

As a "control plane", Agent 365 could also serve as a key mechanism through which Microsoft can charge for the agent consumption. This will be especially valuable if and when agents begin to meaningfully displace traditional user-based scenarios for customers, which could disrupt established revenue patterns.  

“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,” Lamanna wrote.