Agent 365 Not Necessarily Required for Agent Governance

• Agent governance features existed before Agent 365 became available, and they’re still available outside of Agent 365.
• The features are strewn across portals and products, and some require separate licenses.
• The features may be sufficient for organizations with light-scale agent deployments, eliminating the need to purchase Agent 365.
• Knowing which governance features don’t require Agent 365 might be useful during Microsoft contract negotiations.

Agent 365 (A365) aims to bring consistency to AI agent management. It unifies governance, identity management, and security oversight, but it’s a relatively expensive add-on to Microsoft 365 (M365) subscriptions. However, there are other Microsoft agent governance tools that existed prior to A365. The drawback: the non-A365 tools present an inconsistent experience scattered across several UIs with overlap, gaps, and in some cases, extra licensing requirements. Nevertheless, the non-A365 tools might be adequate for some customers, in particular, those with low-scale agent usage, and furthermore, some of these tools will still be required after adopting A365.