During the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft announced several new products and features designed to enable the agent-powered enterprise.
“The future of work will be shaped by Frontier Firms—organizations that are human-led and agent-operated. These companies are reshaping how work gets done, empowering every employee with an AI assistant, amplifying impact with human-agent teamwork, and reinventing business processes with agents. Today at Microsoft Ignite, we introduced new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help every customer become Frontier,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
It announced Agent 365, a control plane for managing agents, whether they are created in Microsoft’s ecosystem or from third-party partners.
Agent 365 consists of a registry that acts as a single source of truth for all of an organization’s agents, access controls for those agents, a unified dashboard and analytics engine that shows connections between agents and humans, interoperability with apps and data, and security capabilities to protect agents from threats and vulnerabilities.
This new offering is available through Microsoft’s Frontier program, the company’s early access initiative for its new AI products.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is also being updated with Work IQ, an intelligence layer that enables Copilot to better understand a user, their job, and their company. It consumes work data— emails, files, and chats—and work patterns—style, preferences, habits, and workflows—and makes connections and uncovers insights from that information.
“It’s an AI-powered feedback loop: Work IQ is woven into the apps you use every day, like Word, Outlook, and Teams, so Copilot is always learning—and using that signal to deliver ever-more tailored and personalized experiences,” the company wrote.
Work IQ can also be leveraged by custom agents to provide better grounding that respects existing permissions, sensitivity labels, compliance controls, audit, logging, monitoring, and policy enforcement. Developers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can now leverage Work IQ in Copilot Studio or via an API, or it can be used with consumption billing.
The company also announced a number of new pre-built agents: new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents; a Sales Development Agent; a Workforce Insights Agent for managers to get insights about their team; and 12 new security agents across Microsoft Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview.
Other updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot include the ability to use voice to communicate with Copilot; access to Sora 2; Copilot Mode in Edge for Business; and Teams Mode to enable group chat with Copilot.
