Satya Nadella recently foreshadowed a major shift in the company’s business — saying the tech giant will increasingly build its products and infrastructure not just for human users, but for autonomous AI agents that operate as a new class of digital workers.
“The way to think about the per-user business is not just per user, it’s per agent,” the Microsoft CEO said during his latest appearance on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast.
At its Ignite conference this week, the company is starting to show what that means. Microsoft is unveiling a series of new products that give IT departments a way to manage and secure their new AI workforce, in much the same way as HR oversees human employees.
The big announcement: Microsoft Agent 365, a new “control plane” that functions as a central management dashboard inside the Microsoft 365 Admin Center that IT teams already use.
Its core function is to govern a company’s entire AI workforce — including agents from Microsoft and other companies — by giving every agent a unique identification. This lets companies use their existing security systems to track what agents are doing, control what data they can access, and prevent them from being hacked or leaking sensitive information.
Microsoft’s approach addresses what has become a major headache for businesses in 2025: “Shadow AI,” with employees turning to unmanaged AI tools at growing rates.
It also represents a big opportunity for the tech industry, as tech giants look to grow revenue to match their massive infrastructure investments. The AI agent market is expanding rapidly, with Microsoft citing analyst estimates of 1.3 billion agents by 2028. Market research firms project the market will grow from around $7.8 billion in 2025 to over $50 billion by 2030.
Google, Amazon, and Salesforce have all rolled out their own agentic platforms for corporate use — Google with its Gemini Enterprise platform, Amazon with new Bedrock AgentCore tools for managing AI agents, and Salesforce with Agentforce 360 for customer-facing agents.
Microsoft is making a series of announcements related to agents at Ignite, its conference for partners, developers, and customers, taking place this week in San Francisco. Other highlights:
- A “fully autonomous” Sales Development Agent will research, qualify, and engage sales leads on its own, acting basically like a new member of the sales team.
- Security Copilot agents in Microsoft’s security tools will help IT teams automate tasks, like having an agent in Intune create a new security policy from a text prompt.
- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents will allow users to ask Copilot, via chat, to create a complete, high-quality document or presentation from scratch.
- Windows is getting a new “Agent Workspace,” a secure, separate environment on the PC where an agent can run complex tasks using its own ID, letting IT monitor its work.
As a backbone for the announcements, Agent 365 leverages Microsoft’s entrenched position in corporate identity and security systems. Instead of asking companies to adopt an entirely new platform, it’s building AI agents into tools that many businesses already use.
For example, in the Microsoft system, each agent gets its own identity inside Microsoft Entra, formerly Active Directory, the same system that handles employee logins and permissions.
Microsoft is rolling out Agent 365 starting this week in preview through Frontier, its early-access program for its newest AI innovations. Pricing has not yet been announced.
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