Microsoft Agent 365

AI agents are rapidly becoming part of everyday work. They draft content, summarize knowledge, coordinate tasks, and integrate into business processes. As they become more capable, they also become more numerous.

This brings incredible opportunities, but also a new category of challenges. How do organizations keep track of hundreds or thousands of agents? How do they make sure each one has the right permissions? How do security, identity, and compliance teams maintain control when agents appear faster than they can be monitored?

Microsoft’s answer is: manage agents the same way you manage people. This credo forms the foundation of Microsoft Agent 365, a new control plane designed to give organizations clarity, security, and governance as AI becomes embedded into daily work.

Why Agent 365 Matters Now

The rise of agents has created a new type of complexity inside organizations. In many companies, agents appear organically: created in Copilot Studio, added by individual teams, or introduced through external tools. As a result, IT often has limited visibility into who created an agent, what data it can access, or how it behaves.

Agent 365 addresses this challenge by bringing agents into the same trusted infrastructure that enterprises already rely on for their human users. Instead of managing yet another parallel system, organizations can extend their existing identity, access, and security tools to their growing fleet of agents.

What exactly is Microsoft Agent 365?

Microsoft Agent 365 is a unified platform for deploying, organizing, and governing AI agents. It supports agents built with Microsoft technologies such as Copilot Studio, but also works with agents from partner clouds, open-source communities, and third-party platforms.

Agent 365 lives directly inside the Microsoft 365 admin center and is available through the Frontier program, Microsoft’s early-access initiative for advanced AI innovation. Because it is built on top of Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, and the full Microsoft 365 productivity suite, organizations can integrate agent management into the tools their IT, security, and compliance teams already use every day.

Five Core Capabilities

Registry

The Registry serves as a single, authoritative source of truth for all agents within an organization. It consolidates agents with Microsoft Entra Agent ID, agents manually registered by teams, and soon, shadow agents that emerge without formal approval. For the first time, IT can see all agents in one place, understand their purpose, and even quarantine unapproved ones to prevent access to users or company data. Integrated with the Agent Store, it also helps employees easily discover approved agents directly within Teams and Microsoft 365.

Access Control

As agents take on more tasks, controlling what they can access becomes essential. Agent 365 ensures that every agent operates under the principle of least privilege. By assigning each agent a unique identity, IT teams can define who is allowed to create or manage agents, set consistent policy templates, and apply adaptive, risk-based access decisions. If an agent behaves suspiciously or shows signs of compromise, Agent 365 can restrict or block its access in real time.

Visualization

Agent 365 provides a unified dashboard that reveals how agents interact with users, data, and each other. Organizations can trace relationships, analyze behavior, measure performance, and evaluate the business value agents deliver. Role-specific reporting ensures that IT, security, and business leaders see the metrics most relevant to them, while compliance teams benefit from detailed logging, retention policies, and tools for investigating unethical or risky interactions.

Interoperability

Agents can only be effective if they understand the context of work and can act on it. Agent 365 connects agents to the same apps and data that employees use every day: Word, Excel, Outlook, Dynamics 365, SharePoint, and more. With access to Work IQ, agents gain awareness of an organization’s unique information, relationships, and workflows. Just as importantly, Agent 365 remains open and flexible, supporting not only Microsoft-built agents but also open-source and third-party systems.

Security

Security is at the core of Agent 365. Agents require protection on multiple layers, from identity and access management to threat detection, runtime defense, and data security. Microsoft Defender helps detect both known and emerging threats targeting agents, while Entra blocks attacks in real time. Purview adds safeguards to prevent agents from exposing or mishandling sensitive data. Together, these capabilities ensure that agents do not become a new attack surface but instead a securely integrated part of the enterprise environment.

How Your Organization Can Get Started

The easiest way to begin exploring Agent 365 is through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Through Frontier, IT teams can experiment with the newest capabilities and understand how agents fit into their organization’s security, identity, and compliance frameworks.

Security professionals will find Agent 365 integrated directly into the tools they already use: Entra for identity and access, Purview for data protection and compliance, and Defender for threat detection and response. Instead of juggling multiple new systems, they gain a single control plane for users, apps, and agents alike.

The New Era of Human & Agent Collaboration

Microsoft Agent 365 represents a fundamental shift in how organizations work with AI. It turns agents from isolated experiments into fully governed, enterprise-grade contributors. By giving agents the same identity, access control, security protections, and oversight as human users, organizations can scale their agent workforce with confidence.

As AI becomes more deeply integrated into daily work, Agent 365 ensures it does so safely, responsibly, and with measurable business impact. The future belongs to teams made up of humans and agents working together, and Agent 365 is the platform that brings this to life.

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