November 12, 2025
BlogMicrosoft’s Agent 365 digital ’employees’ are coming for your business
Ahead of Microsoft’s Ignite conference next week, rumors are swirling about Microsoft launching an “Agent 365” platform. If the tips pan out, Agent 365 could become a way for Microsoft to unify how the increasing number of autonomous agents will be managed, licensed and priced across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, going forward.
Microsoft seemingly inadvertently published a screen shot featuring the “Agent 365” branding earlier this month as part of a Microsoft 365 Admin Center post (which the company has subsequently unpublished). Microsoft also removed the connected roadmap entry (518220) about agentic users from its Microsoft 365 Roadmap.
The screen shot was featured in MC1183300, which Microsoft initially published on Nov. 6 (and a copy of which is here). That message described “agentic users” as “a new class of AI powered digital entities designed to function as autonomous, enterprise-grade virtual colleagues.” Agentic users, unlike bots, will be provisioned as “full-fledged user objects,” with identities in the organization’s directory (via Entra ID or Azure AD), email addresses, Teams accounts and presence in the org chart.
Agent templates, which are preconfigured digital worker profiles, will be available in Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft 365 Agent Store, according to the message. Targeted rollout of these agentic users is supposed to begin in mid-November on the desktop platform for Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, the message says. And admins will be the ones assigning the required “A365” license at the time of approval, with “no additional Microsoft 365 or Teams license required.”
In early Oct. 2025, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Agent Framework, which is an open-source software development kit and runtime for building and managing multi-agent systems. And this past spring, Microsoft took the wraps off another piece of the supporting puzzle: Microsoft Entra Agent ID, which is designed to help manage agents’ identities, lifecycles and permissions across Microsoft Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and later, Security Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot and third-party solutions.
Pricing and Licensing Details Not Yet Clear
While Microsoft has priced Microsoft 365 Copilot at a flat $30 per user per month, it hasn’t delivered a clear, consistent approach to licensing and pricing agents.
It has folded some of its agents, like Researcher and Analyst, into Microsoft 365 Copilot for no additional charge. But in the case of SharePoint Agents and Copilot Studio, which customers can use to build agents, agents are priced based on a number of factors. Agents are charged via meters that count the consumption of a Microsoft-defined unit called Copilot Credits (formerly “messages”). Copilot Credits are billed on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis or by purchasing capacity packs up front for a discount. In Oct. 2025 (called Pre-Purchase Plan or sometimes P3) allows upfront purchasing of Copilot Credits on an annual basis with discounts that increase with the number of Copilot Credits purchased.
It does seem as though the new Agent 365 licensing model could apply to both Microsoft-built and custom agents. And under the new model, every agent would need a license, in the way that every user needs one now.
Rich Gibbons, of Cloudy with a Chance of Licensing fame, has wondered whether Microsoft is planning to price and license its agents by role, meaning there could be an Agent 365 for HR, for Sales, etc. Or maybe Microsoft is looking to enable agent pricing and licensing based on more granular job functions with certain industry domains, like booking patient appointments in the healthcare field, as Dynamics 365 Consultant Muhammad Hammad Wali suggested in a post on LinkedIn.
Hopefully Ignite will bring answers to at least some of our Agent 365 questions.
