Microsoft Introduces Agent 365 to Manage AI Agents at Scale

Microsoft introduced Agent 365 on November 18 at the Ignite 2025 conference in Chicago, positioning the tool as a system to help businesses oversee artificial intelligence agents with the same structures used for human workers.

Photo Credits: Microsoft

The company described the product as a control plane that registers agents, controls their access to resources, visualizes their operations, ensures they work with existing applications and provides security protections.

The launch comes as Microsoft expands its artificial intelligence offerings beyond earlier tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, which debuted in 2023 to assist with tasks in applications such as Word and Excel.

Last month, the company added Agent Mode to Copilot, allowing users to create specialized agents for roles like researcher or analyst.

Now, Agent 365 extends that foundation by treating agents as part of the workforce, assigning them unique identities through Microsoft Entra and limiting their permissions to prevent unauthorized actions.

"AI agents are already changing how work gets done across industries. They automate tasks, collaborate with people, and accelerate productivity," according to a Microsoft announcement. Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft, said, “Agents are already changing how people work, and IDC predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028.”

Agent 365 includes a registry that serves as a central inventory for all agents in an organization, whether built with Microsoft's platforms, open-source tools or third-party systems from partners like Adobe and ServiceNow.

Administrators can use dashboards to monitor connections between agents, employees and data, along with real-time alerts on behavior.

Photo Credits: Microsoft

The tool also applies risk-based policies to block compromised agents and scans for threats like prompt injection attacks.

Charles Lamanna, president of business and industry for Microsoft’s Copilot, said:

“Tools that you use to manage people, devices, and applications today, you'd want to extend them to run agents as well in the future.” He added, “As data flows between people, agents, and applications, it stays protected.”

The product integrates with Microsoft 365 applications and Work IQ, an intelligence layer that draws on organizational data for context.

Microsoft has made Agent 365 available through its Frontier early access program, where IT teams can test it before wider rollout.

The company operates millions of agents internally and expects businesses to deploy them in numbers far exceeding human staff, such as half a million to a million agents for a firm with 100,000 employees.

"The clearest path forward is to manage agents the way you manage people, using the same infrastructure, apps, and protections that power your business today," Microsoft stated in its release.