Microsoft Launches Agent 365, a Control Plane to Manage and Govern AI Workers at Scale

Microsoft is unveiling a new platform called Agent 365 that will integrate identity and governance into all AI agents, eliminating the need for it to be done as an afterthought. It extends the infrastructure IT departments use to manage employee access to agents. The first agent powered by this product is Microsoft’s new Sales Development Agent, a bot that performs sales functionality independently as a virtual teammate.

Both of these are part of a host of announcements being made at this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, which has a theme of exploring the “lifecycle of AI” and introducing tools to accelerate digital transformation.

Introducing Agent 365

Described as the “control plane for agents,” Agent 365 is Microsoft’s layer for managing, governing, and orchestrating these AI-powered bots, copilots, and assistants. It comes equipped with security and governance tools (Defender, Entra, Purview), productivity and context apps (Word, Excel, Outlook, and Work IQ), and management tools (Microsoft 365 admin center) built right into the platform, providing an out-of-the-box ecosystem for IT teams.

The idea behind Agent 365 is that it enables organizations to manage the identities of these virtual workers. Every bot “gets its own identity, and you have a full registry…where you can see all the agents in the organization,” Julie Strauss, Microsoft’s vice president for AI sales and marketing applications, tells The AI Economy in an interview. “You can see what they’re doing. All access controls are done in the exact same way we control the human access, and you really have this very powerful interoperability with the identity system.”

In other words, Agent 365 is a fully managed agent identity platform, which will hopefully be helpful as the number of agents in an organization continues to grow.

Here’s what this offering provides:

• Registry: Catalogs all the agents in an organization, including those with an agent ID, those registered by admins, and so-called “shadow agents.”
• Access control: Acts like the One Ring, bringing all bots under management and limiting their access to only the information they need.
• Visualization: Provides IT teams with a graphical view of how agents, people, and data interact, while also monitoring agent behavior and performance in real-time.
• Interoperability: Bestow agents with access to apps and data required to make human-agent workflows more efficient.
• Security: Even agents need to be equipped with cyber defenses to protect themselves from threats and vulnerabilities. In addition, Agent 365 protects the data that agents create and use from oversharing, leaks, and any risky behavior.

How does this differ from the identity, governance, and orchestration capabilities that companies may receive from Okta, SailPoint, ServiceNow, Ping Identity, or UiPath? “I think the fact that it all comes end-to-end as a SaaS solution,” Strauss remarks. “If we take the angle of…the full package, you walk up to a team store, and IT decides this agent can be available in the organization. A sales leader can now walk up and say, ‘Yes, I want this agent.’ You can interview the agent on how it works. You say, ‘deploy,’ and you have all this be part of it. So the…manual steps, they’re just fully eliminated. It’s really a few clicks to get started and have that full identity infrastructure be part of that deployment.”

She confirms that there are plans to potentially expand Agent 365 and integrate it into the broader Microsoft platform, rather than being limited to its own self-developed agents. The company is already working with unnamed partners to leverage Agent 365. “It’s not absolutely for the broader sake of the ecosystem,” she comments. “It’s not just for our first-party developed agents.”

What Makes the Sales Development Agent Unique?

To showcase the power of Agent 365 and further demonstrate the capabilities of AI, Microsoft is releasing a new Sales Development Agent.

“We think of it as a teammate, but in a way that the Sales Development Agent can help sellers do the part of their job where today they might not use all their human superpowers in the best way,” Strauss explains. “So, really help do that ground research and outreach, craft emails, etc., so that the sellers can focus on where they have their superpowers. It’s building empathy, deep relationships, spending time on the deals…with higher margins that require more depth and independence.”

This isn’t Microsoft’s first foray into developing a first-party AI-driven sales agent. The company has already rolled out a sales assistant in Microsoft 365 Copilot and similar capabilities within Dynamics 365. Still, as Strauss clarifies, all of these bots are part of a spectrum that caters to organizations with different needs: “It will augment what we have released already. It is not really replacing anything.”

According to her, when Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales debuted in the spring, that was in an “assistive mode,” meaning that while it can research leads and conduct outreach, it depended on human workers constantly directing the agent on what to do. “It was very human-driven,” Strauss declares.

Microsoft’s new Sales Development Agent lets AI take the wheel, so to speak. Instead of having humans act as reviewers and approvers, the agent will focus on a lead segment, research, and qualify them. It can automatically update records within CRM systems, draft and send emails to customers, and even engage with them as an agent. “Before, we constantly had the human be the trigger of the action. Now, we allow the agent to do it,” Strauss says.

Another way of thinking about the Sales Development Agent is as an “embodiment agent.” It possesses its own identity within a team, and sellers can interact with it. The bot is akin to a virtual worker, moving beyond an assistant to a trusted colleague charged with specific responsibilities. Microsoft appears to believe technology like this is what companies are looking for as they transition into becoming “Frontier Firms.”

Even though this sales agent has been given more agency, this isn’t a sign that Microsoft is embracing a human-free agentic experience in the enterprise. It believes there is a mixture of agent types that will be used, ranging from human-triggered ones to more autonomous ones.

There are plans to make this new type of agent extensible, though the exact plans haven’t been revealed. Currently, Microsoft isn’t opening up the technology behind the Sales Development Agent to developers, which would allow them to create their own specialized embodied bot (perhaps for different business functions like marketing or finance?). Third-party extensibility will be a focus for Microsoft in the future as it looks to create an ecosystem around not only this tech, but also its Agent 365 platform.

“The announcement of the Sales Development Agent and Agent 365 is really pivotal in terms of being able to deploy, test, and build confidence in the areas where AI can really make a transformational difference in how sellers work,” Strauss points out. “The fact that the agent allows you to do test runs, take a segment out, and see how it does. You can role-play how the agent actually researches the leads. How does it do the outreach, create that confidence before you go to a broader deployment? I think that’s a really important aspect of it, backed by the embodiment, the autonomy, and the kind of identity behind it for full management.”

Both the Sales Development Agent and Agent 365 are now available through Microsoft’s early access Frontier program.

Featured Image: The components of Microsoft Agent 365. Credit: Microsoft