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Microsoft is racing towards building an AI “agent factory” that lets businesses build and manage their own AI agents. While Microsoft was founded on the idea of being a software factory, it’s quickly being transformed into an era where AI agents will increasingly take on more human work. Now, Microsoft is launching Agent 365 as a way for businesses to manage AI agents in the same way they do humans.
“Agents are already changing how people work, and IDC predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028,” says Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft. “Agent 365 is the control plane for agents, extending the infrastructure you trust to manage your people to agents.”
The Agent 365 dashboards. Image: Microsoft
Agent 365 will help businesses deploy and organize AI agents securely, to ensure these new AI coworkers don’t do anything unexpected. Agent 365 is effectively a framework that has dashboards to show how AI agents are operating, with telemetry and alerts. It allows businesses to register AI agents with Microsoft Entra registry, limit what they have access to, ensure they can integrate with Microsoft 365 apps, and protect against external and internal security threats.
It will also embrace a broader ecosystem of AI agents from companies like Adobe, Nvidia, ServiceNow, Workday, and more. The dashboards inside Agent 365 will let admins see connections between agents, people, and data, as well as monitor how AI agents are behaving in real time.
Microsoft is making Agent 365 available through Frontier, the company’s early-access program for AI features. This early rollout is designed for IT admins to test scenarios for adopting and managing AI agents.