Microsoft doubles down on agentic AI — Agent 365 prepares for a future with over 1 billion agents

by

Microsoft‘s Ignite conference started this week, and the company has already revealed some big news. A lot of the focus is on ‘agents’ – a popular topic right now. Microsoft Agent 365, recently announced, will allow businesses to easily manage and use these agents.

AI agents are tools that automate tasks. Microsoft describes them as the “apps of the AI era,” a significant comparison given how much we rely on apps today.

Agents can simplify workflows by handling routine tasks and analyzing information. What’s really powerful is their ability to work across various platforms and systems.

A recent Microsoft-sponsored study by IDC forecasts 1.3 billion AI agents will be in use by 2028. To simplify the creation and management of these agents, Microsoft has developed Agent 365.

Agent 365 is designed to work with AI agents built using Microsoft’s platforms like Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry, as well as tools created by the open-source community. During the Ignite 2025 conference, Microsoft highlighted five main features of Agent 365:

  • A registry to give you a single source of truth for all the agents in your organization
  • Access control to manage agents and limit their access to only the resources
    required to perform specific tasks
  • Visualization—a unified dashboard and advanced analytics to see connections
    between agents, people, and data, and monitor agent behavior and performance in real time
  • Interoperability to equip agents with apps and data to simplify human-agent
    workflows
  • Security to help protect agents from threats and vulnerabilities and detect,
    investigate, and remediate attacks that target agents

Agent 365 helps you manage support agents, regardless of where they come from. However, Microsoft is also increasingly incorporating its own agents directly into its products.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will include specialized tools for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These tools, called agents, will let you collaborate with Copilot in a more interactive way within each application.

Copilot Chat will also feature a mode called Agent Mode, which combines information from the web and your files to assist with content creation.

Outlook is also getting some new tools for people who manage other users’ accounts, but our Senior Editor Zac Bowden wrote a separate article about those features.

The Windows 11 Taskbar is also getting an update that aims to make it more proactive, although some people have questioned how ‘smart’ Windows is becoming.

Pavan Davuluri, who leads the Windows team at Microsoft, turned off comments on one of his X posts after it received a lot of negative feedback. He later addressed the criticism, saying the Windows team is paying attention to what people are saying.

Microsoft is likely aiming for a more positive response to its upcoming AI agents in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Copilot, compared to the initial reaction when the idea was first introduced by Davuluri.

What is an AI agent?

AI agents are tools that help simplify tasks and automate processes. Microsoft offers several of these agents, but companies like Adobe and others are also developing their own.

Do I need Microsoft 365 to use Agent 365?

To use Agent 365, you’ll need at least one Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Currently, you also need to be enrolled in the Frontier preview program, which gives you early access to Microsoft’s latest AI features.

Read More

2025-11-19 00:39