Companies are drowning in AI agents. Sales agents. Customer service agents. Data analysis agents. HR agents. Some built by IT, most created by employees who found a cool tool online (maybe even something we showed y’all!). Nobody knows what’s running, what data agents can access, or which ones might be security risks.
Microsoft just solved this at Ignite 2025 with Agent 365, a control plane that discovers, manages, and secures every AI agent in your organization. Think of it as the IT admin dashboard for your robot workforce.
Here’s what makes this a big deal
- Agent 365 creates a complete registry of every agent in your org, including “shadow agents“ that employees created on their own. No more surprises when Finance discovers Marketing’s been running an unapproved agent with access to customer data for three months.
- It applies risk-based access controls to agents just like employees. IT can limit agents to only the resources they need, block risky agents before they cause problems, and set conditional access policies based on agent behavior.
- The system offers real-time monitoring showing connections between agents, people, and data. IT teams can finally see what agents are actually doing and measure their impact on the organization.
Oh, also? Security is built in: Agent 365 integrates Microsoft Defender for threat protection, Microsoft Entra for identity management, and Microsoft Purview for data governance. Agents get the same enterprise-grade security as human employees.
Microsoft also announced concrete examples of what these managed agents look like:
- Sales Development Agent (available now via Frontier program): A fully autonomous sales agent that researches prospects, crafts personalized outreach, and follows up 24/7. When leads are qualified, it hands them off to human sellers. Basically, an SDR that never sleeps.
- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents in Copilot Chat: Create high-quality Office content by asking targeted questions to understand your goals. They handle research, formatting, and layout design—no more staring at blank documents.
- Twelve new Security Copilot agents embedded in existing security tools to automate alert triage, identity risk management, endpoint compliance, and data remediation.
Oh yeah, and guess who made it official? Anthropic is now officially part of the Azure ecosystem: Microsoft added Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Haiku, and Opus to its library. It is now the only cloud provider hosting both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Why this matters
A new IDC study commissioned by Microsoft surveyed 4K+ business leaders and found something striking. While 68% of companies use AI today, there’s a massive gap forming.
The top 22% (called “Frontier firms“) are achieving returns three times higher than slow adopters. What separates them? They use AI across an average of seven business functions (not just one or two), they’re building custom AI solutions (58% today, jumping to 77% in 24 months), and they’re aggressively adopting agentic AI.“
IDC estimates the number of companies using agentic AI will triple in the next two years (the number quoted at Ignite was 1.3 billion agents deployed by 2028. So the window to become a Frontier firm is closing.
Agent 365 gives organizations the infrastructure to scale agents without losing control and solving the exact concerns (security, governance, visibility) that have kept IT departments from embracing autonomous AI.
It’s available now through Microsoft’s Frontier program.
Check out the rest of our coverage on Microsoft Ignite here.
Editor’s note: This content originally ran in the newsletter of our sister publication, The Neuron. To read more from The Neuron, sign up for its newsletter here.