Microsoft is racing to create an AI “agent factory” that lets businesses create and manage their own AI agents. While Microsoft was founded on the idea of being a software factory, it is rapidly transforming into an era where AI agents will perform increasingly more human tasks. Now, Microsoft is launching Agent 365 as a way for businesses to manage AI agents the same way they manage humans.
“Agents are already changing the way people work and IDC estimates there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028,” says Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Microsoft. “Agents 365 is the control plane for agents, extending your trust infrastructure to manage your people all the way to agents.”
Agent 365 will help businesses securely deploy and provision AI agents, ensuring these new AI colleagues don’t do anything unexpected. Agent 365 is effectively a framework that has dashboards with telemetry and alerts to show how AI agents are performing. It allows businesses to register AI agents with the Microsoft Entra registry, limit their access, ensure they can integrate with Microsoft 365 apps, and protect against external and internal security threats.
It will also embrace the broader ecosystem of AI agents from companies like Adobe, Nvidia, ServiceNow, Workday, and others. Dashboards inside Agent 365 will let administrators see connections between agents, people, and data, as well as monitor how AI agents are behaving in real time.
Microsoft is making Agent 365 available through Frontier, the company’s early-access program for AI features. This initial rollout is designed to test scenarios for IT administrators adopting and managing AI agents.