Microsoft's new Agent 365 platform is a one-stop shop for deploying, securing, and keeping tabs on AI agents

Microsoft has announced the launch of Microsoft Agent 365, a new “control plane” platform aimed at enabling enterprises to deploy and track the use of AI agents.

Unveiled at Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference in San Francisco, the company said the new platform will bolster observability and help IT leaders set strict access controls for agents.

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft president for business apps & agents, said the platform looks to help businesses “manage agents the way you manage people”.

“Agent 365 delivers unified observability across your entire agent fleet through telemetry, dashboards, and alerts,” he said.

“IT leaders can track every agent being used, built, or brought into the organizations, eliminating blind spots and reducing risk,” Lamanna added.

The move from Microsoft comes ahead of a projected surge in the use of AI agents globally in the coming years. Analysis from IDC, for example, predicts there will be roughly 1.3 billion agents in operation globally by 2028.

What to expect with Microsoft Agent 365

The new platform focuses on five key capabilities, providing tools for agent registry, access control, security, visualization, and interoperability for agents built through Microsoft or via open source and third-party platforms.

With regard to agent registry, the tech giant revealed new features for its Entra ID service, which allows users to create a “complete inventory” of agents being used across the enterprises.

“It also allows IT admins to quarantine unsanctioned agents to ensure that they cannot be discovered by users or connect to other agents or organizational resources,” Lamanna explained.

Elsewhere, access control features aim to prevent AI agents from gaining unauthorized access to certain storage pools. To achieve this, each individual agent will be allocated a unique “agent ID”, Lamanna noted.

“You can manage them and limit their access only to the resources they need,” he explained. “Agents operate with the principle of least privilege, accessing only resources they need to complete their tasks, reducing the risk of misuse by malicious actors or accidental data loss.”

IT teams can also set guardrails aimed at granting access to specific individual workers to create, deploy, and manage agents.

Mapping out agents in your environments

Setting access controls for agents deployed across an IT estate is one thing; actually keeping tabs on them and how they’re performing is another, according to Microsoft.

The tech giant said built-in analytics tools will help provide a “complete map of connections among agents, users, and resources”.

Through this analytics dashboard, users can also track agent activity metrics such as speed and performance quality. This, the company noted, will help IT leaders “assess return on investment to make informed deployment decisions”.

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