Microsoft launches Agent 365 to manage enterprise AI agents

09:22

By: Dakir Madiha

Microsoft launches Agent 365 to manage enterprise AI agents

Microsoft made Agent 365 generally available to business customers on Thursday, providing a unified control plane to observe, govern, and secure AI agents in corporate settings. Announced at Microsoft Ignite in November 2025 and slated for May 1, 2026, it ranks among the biggest Microsoft 365 releases since Copilot's debut.

Agent 365 delivers IT, security, and business teams a central registry and management layer for all organizational AI agents, regardless of origin—built on Microsoft platforms like Copilot Studio and Foundry, partner ecosystems, or third-party tech. It rests on three pillars: observability, governance, and security, leveraging existing Microsoft tools such as Defender, Entra, Purview, and Intune. Microsoft Defender now inventories AI agents for security posture management across Copilot Studio, Foundry, AWS Bedrock, and GCP Vertex AI. Each agent gets a Microsoft Entra Agent ID for identity-based controls like conditional access and lifecycle management. Microsoft Purview adds prompt inspection for online data loss prevention.

Pricing stands at $15 per user per month as a standalone add-on, or bundled in the new Microsoft 365 E7 pack at $99 per user monthly—about 15% savings versus separate purchases. E7 combines Microsoft 365 E5, Copilot, Agent 365, and Entra suite.

The rollout expands partner support. Genspark announced a strategic tie-up integrating presentation, spreadsheet, and document agents into Microsoft 365 and Agent 365. Kore.ai serves as launch partner from Ignite, while open-source workflow platform n8n integrates natively, granting n8n-built agents managed Microsoft 365 identities. Reply joined as launch partner in April. Agent 365 handles multicloud deployments, with docs for AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google Cloud Run agents using Entra and Graph for identity and governance.

Europe timing matters as the EU AI Act fully activates August 2, 2026. Agent 365's registry, identity controls, and compliance features offer a compliance foundation, though firms must map them to risk management, transparency, and human oversight rules. Windows 365 for Agents, unveiled in January, extends to cloud PCs with agent workload check-in/out and human-in-loop safeguards.