Agent 365: Microsoft Attempts to Herd Your AI Agents

• Microsoft’s Agent 365 seeks to help organizations increase the manageability, security, and compliance of their agents.
• Agent 365 is not a service but a set of features from across Microsoft 365 services including Entra, Purview, and Defender.
• Some capabilities of Agent 365 remain in preview, although the service is GA as of May 1, 2026 in conjunction with Microsoft 365 E7.

Microsoft Agent 365 offers a new set of capabilities that seeks to help organizations improve the governance of their agents that work with Microsoft 365 Copilot and similar AI technologies. (Agents are AI-based processes that perform tasks within focused domains and knowledge sources, such as working with Microsoft 365 services and internal line-of-business apps and retrieving data from specific documents and databases on behalf of users.) Agent 365 includes identity management using Entra, compliance controls using Purview, and security infrastructure using Defender XDR. While the capabilities of Agent 365 may sound appealing, organizations should consider that the offering is more a collection of loosely coupled features than a single service. The service shipped on May 1, 2026, as a component of the new Microsoft 365 E7 suite of services that arrived the same day. However, not all features are available yet, documentation is limited, and many agents will not work with Agent 365 without some modification.