Microsoft is opening the door to more intelligent, autonomous AI agents in Teams. At its 2025 Build conference, the company announced a new developer toolkit that will make it easier to build and deploy agents directly within meetings on the platform, for both private and group use. The update includes support for Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) interoperability protocol, as well as new capabilities like agentic memory, automated validation, and an upgraded Teams AI library.
Everything here is said to be available in preview starting in May.
To support agent development, Microsoft is embracing the Agent2Agent protocol, Google’s standard for letting bots communicate with each other. This shouldn’t be surprising: Microsoft revealed this earlier this month and said A2A would be supported by its Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio.
“We’re aligning with the broader industry push for shared agent protocols—doing what we’ve always done: embracing openness, supporting real-world developers, and turning experimentation into enterprise-grade platforms,” Microsoft’s Vice President of Product for Azure AI Foundry, Yina Arenas, and its Chief Technology Officer for Copilot Studio, Bas Brekelmans, wrote at the time. “Our goal is simple: empower both pro and citizen developers to build agents that interoperate across clouds and frameworks.”
Thanks to A2A, developers can build agents for Microsoft Teams that can securely communicate with other bots, allowing them to swap messages, data, and credentials seamlessly without human intervention.
In addition, Microsoft is introducing agentic memory on Teams. This service allows bots to recall user interactions smartly, resulting in more personalized and context-aware experiences. There’s also automated agent validation, which ensures the bots comply with the Microsoft Store policies and are optimized for high-quality performance.
When it comes to evaluating an agent’s effectiveness, Microsoft is adding new analytics to its developer portal to provide real-time insight into bot adoption and engagement.
Lastly, the company is refreshing its Teams AI library to help developers build “more powerful collaborative agents for Teams.” This destination is for integrating GPT-based language models and user intent engines, offering prebuilt, reusable code snippets. The iteration currently in preview for JavaScript and C# simplifies custom agent creation and provides access to the latest capabilities.
Incorporating more sophisticated bots into meetings and the collaboration space will help companies become “Frontier Firms”—organizations that have embraced an AI-first mentality and believe the future is where humans and agents work together. By having AI agents “sit” in on meetings, they can handle all the mundane and administrative tasks, like notetaking, transcription, creating meeting templates, managing calendars, clip generation, and more. If Microsoft’s Work Trend Index is right—and knowledge workers will soon be managing teams of bots—then bringing these capabilities to a collaboration-first platform like Teams makes perfect sense.
Advanced agentic support keeps Teams in the race with competitors, such as Zoom, which added new AI skills and agents to its generative AI digital assistant earlier this year, and Salesforce’s Slack, which has long offered bots on its platform. By automating routine tasks and providing intelligent support, these agents can free employees to focus on more strategic and creative work. As organizations continue to embrace an AI-first approach, the seamless incorporation of these technologies into everyday communication and collaboration platforms will become increasingly crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in the modern business landscape.
Featured Image: AI-generated image showing multiple bots in a computer exchanging data. Credit: Adobe Firefly
Subscribe to “The AI Economy”
Exploring AI’s impact on business, work, society, and technology.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.