Microsoft used Ignite 2025 to tell the world that “agents are now the primary interface for enterprise work“. The focus throughout Ignite was about evolution from chat-bots to multi-discipline teams of agents across organisations and the unlaying architectural envelopments being done to make this work.
Agents are already changing how people work, and IDC predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028. Agent 365 is the control plane for agents, extending the infrastructure you trust to manage your people to agents.
This was about spelling out the developments across platform and the unifying of intelligence layers so agents can be treated as identity‑bound workers and allow security and governance to be baked in in the same way we manage human workers today. Below is a summary of the key aspects and ingredients of this approach.
Fabric IQ
What it is: Fabric IQ layers semantic meaning and business ontologies on top of data stores so agents reason in terms of customers, orders, assets, and events rather than raw tables.
Why it matters: Agents that lack consistent business context make brittle or risky decisions. Fabric IQ gives agents a shared vocabulary and entity model, reducing ambiguity across analytics, automation, and agent workflows.
Example: A retail replenishment agent uses Fabric IQ to translate “low stock” signals into SKU hierarchies, supplier lead times, and regional demand forecasts. The agent then creates the correct purchase order, selects the right vendor SLA, and schedules delivery windows – cutting stockouts and manual reconciliation time.
Foundry Control Plane
What it is: Foundry will become the unified platform for building, routing, and operating agents with model selection, versioning, and governance hooks built in. It includes a built‑in control plane that brings security, observability, and cost signals directly into the developer experience. It surfaces alerts, policy violations, performance issues, and budget warnings where teams already build – and exposes Microsoft Entra, Defender, and Purview controls as simple toggles so identity, data protection, and threat detection can be enabled without re‑architecting toolchains.
Why it matters: Foundry reduces model selection risk, standardises deployment patterns, and makes governance a first‑class concern rather than an afterthought. It’s the place teams certify agents, attach policies, and monitor behaviour. It means developers can ship agents that are secure from day one, remain protected through updates, and automatically flow into Agent 365 governance at deployment. By meeting teams in their existing workflows, Microsoft removes much of the friction between building agents and securing them — a much needed “fix” for an area that has tripped up many enterprises and halted mass adoption.
Example: A financial services team certifies an underwriting agent in Foundry. The control plane enforces data access policies, routes sensitive scoring to on‑prem models, and produces audit trails for regulators – enabling faster production rollouts without compromising compliance.
Agent 365
What it is: Agent 365 treats agents like employees: Entra identities, scoped permissions, lifecycle management, and telemetry. It produces a security framework for how agents should be deployed and managed within an organisation. It gives IT and SecOps teams a single, consistent way to discover, manage, and secure agents wherever they’re built.
Agents are already changing how people work, and IDC predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028. Agent 365 is the control plane for agents, extending the infrastructure you trust to manage your people to agents.
Microsoft Ignite 2025
Agent 365 extends Entra ID with the same controls organisations already use to manage their people into the agent world with a – Entra Agent ID for identity and access, Defender for threat detection and posture, and Purview for data protection and compliance. Rather than new tools, this provides the familiar surface control plane where agents can collaborate and interact with users, keeping behaviour visible inside the tools people already use.
Why it matters: When agents have identity and governance, organisations can scale fleets safely. You can onboard, revoke, and audit agents the same way you manage human users.
IT gets a central registry of every agent across the estate; developers can register third‑party or custom agents via SDKs; and security teams gain continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and enforcement capabilities such as conditional access.
For organisations wrestling with shadow AI and governance gaps, Agent 365 is a practical answer – it treats agents as first‑class entities that must be onboarded, scoped, audited, and revoked just like human accounts.
Example: An HR department deploys multiple document‑generation agents. Agent 365 ensures each agent only accesses approved templates and employee records, preventing accidental PII exposure and making incident investigations straightforward.
Azure Copilot for Cloud Ops
What it is: Azure Copilot orchestrates specialised cloud agents for migrations, observability, remediation, and optimisation – this can turn runbooks into agent workflows.
Why it matters: Cloud operations shift from manual dashboards to intent‑driven orchestration. Agents can triage, remediate, and coordinate across services faster than human‑only teams.
Example: During a cross‑region outage, Azure Copilot coordinates agents to triage logs, roll back a faulty deployment, and provision temporary capacity – reducing mean time to recovery from hours to minutes.
Conclusion
Ignite 2025 reframeed “AI” from an add‑on to an operational fabric for every organisation as we start to transition into the next phase of AI maturity and adoption.
Microsoft’s combination of Fabric IQ, Foundry and Agent 365 creates a practical path to agentic operations for business, but success still very much depends on the fuel for AI – disciplined data modeling, governance by design, and small, measurable pilots.
Organisations that treat agents as governed, identity‑bound teammates will be the ones that gain speed and resilience fastest – those that don’t face sprawl and risk and stalled or failed initiatives.
