What is Microsoft Agent 365? The control plane for your organisation's AI agents

Copilot made agents easy to create — which means every tenant is quietly accumulating them, built by different people, on different platforms, with different access. Microsoft Agent 365 is Microsoft's answer to the question every IT lead is about to ask: what agents do we even have, and who's watching them?

Observe: one registry for everything

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, Agents > All Agents shows a unified inventory of enterprise AI agents across platforms, publishers and channels — including agents registered in Entra and agents that aren't Microsoft's. This is the registry experience Microsoft is converging on: it previously lived partly in Microsoft Entra, and the Entra admin center now focuses on agent identities while Agent 365 holds the full inventory. An Agent map and overview dashboards add adoption, activity and health views.

Roles matter more than licences for looking: the AI Reader role is the least-privilege way to see the inventory, AI Administrator to manage it.

Govern: lifecycle, access and instances

Template agents can be instantiated — a manager spins up their own copy of an approved agent — and the admin center manages those instances centrally: counts per template, per-instance settings, compliance status and licence assignment. Under the covers, Microsoft Entra Agent ID gives agents identities the way users have them, so Conditional Access, identity governance and permissions apply to agents too. Agent ID itself is available to all Entra customers; it's the richer Agent 365 experience that carries the licence.

Custom MCP servers join the same system: you can register your own MCP server through the Agent 365 registry, and once approved it becomes available in Copilot Studio.

Secure: risk signals across platforms

The registry's Risks column aggregates security detections per agent from Microsoft Purview, Entra and Defender — grouped by severity, with occurrence counts and deep links into the source portal. The point is triage without portal-hopping or borrowing a security role. Risk-signal visibility is gated: it needs an E7 or Agent 365 licence on the tenant.

Pause animation

1. 1Observe — one registry and map
2. 2Govern — identities, lifecycle, instances
3. 3Secure — aggregated risk signals

Who needs the licence

• Included in Microsoft 365 E7 — the 2026 suite that bundles E5, Microsoft Copilot and the Entra Suite with Agent 365.
• Add-on to Microsoft 365 E5, A5 or Business Premium (or the Defender + Purview suite combination), licensed per user.
• Free to look: viewing the agent inventory requires only the right admin role, no Agent 365 licence. The licence pays for the deeper controls — extending Entra security features to agents, agentic governance in Purview, and the risk-signal views.

Sources

• Overview of Microsoft Agent 365 — Microsoft Learn
• Agent management in the Microsoft 365 admin center — Microsoft Learn
• Manage the agent registry — Microsoft Learn
• Agent Registry convergence with Microsoft Agent 365 — Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft Entra licensing: Agent ID — Microsoft Learn