Agent 365 unpacked: Managing AI agents across an enterprise

• There are three stepping stones to embracing AI agents: Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry. The five-stage AI adoption journey allows entry at any stage. 

• Agent 365’s IDs, centralised access control, registry and visualisation tools are the governance toolkit to monitor and constrain agent behaviour. 

• Defender and Purview interoperability with Agent 365 is a core advantage for enterprise monitoring, security and governance across large ecosystems. 

If the goal is risk-managed, scalable artificial intelligence (AI) across your organisation – not just isolated pilots – you need to be using Microsoft Copilot at a highly innovative level to really achieve efficiency gains. AI agents implemented into all of your organisation’s workflows, while still being managed by human bosses, can be the powerful strategy to get you there. Microsoft’s Agent 365, alongside Datacom’s local expertise, delivers an enterprise-wide governance spine for this functionality, enabling visibility and governance of those agents, as well as security and measurable value from pilot programmes to full-scale AI. 

Expanding use of AI is helping businesses excel. Microsoft’s research with the International Data Corporation (IDC) into leading enterprises has found that Frontier Firms are achieving returns three times higher than slow adopters. Frontier Firms – which are organisations leading the charge in innovation, emerging technology and productivity – are using AI across an average of seven business functions, monetising industry-specific AI use cases, investing in custom AI solutions and embracing AI agents.  

Datacom is helping Australasian businesses transform their operations using the Microsoft continuum of AI tools, which support businesses at every stage of their journey. 

“There are three product-related stepping stones: Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio and custom solutions with Microsoft Foundry (formerly, Azure AI Foundry),” says Steve de Longchamps, Consulting Director for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, Datacom. “Our Microsoft practice teams are enabling customer journeys specifically with those products in mind.”  

There are five stages of AI adoption, de Longchamps explains:  

1. Getting started: “Customers who are starting out and using Copilot Chat. There’s a very low barrier to entry: Copilot Chat is available at no extra cost with eligible Microsoft 365 plans, and surfaces directly in their everyday M365 apps.” 
2. Experimenting with agents: “M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio let you create simple agents with low or no code. When you’re ready for more advanced, custom scenarios, developers can use Microsoft Foundry to build richer agents.”  
3. Securing and governing AI: “This is where Agent 365 becomes important in a big way. It’s about governance over your AI agent workforce, just like you would your people and their access to enterprise information assets.”  
4. Embedding AI into core business applications. 
5. Scaling AI across an enterprise.  

“It’s not a linear journey,” adds de Longchamps. “Customers can drop in at any of those levels, whether they’re just dabbling, establishing guardrails or they already have a mature position.” 

As Frontier Firms incorporate agentic AI into more operational areas, it becomes essential to be able to manage and monitor these agents. Agent 365 is Microsoft’s governance tool, providing a new level of visibility over every agent across an enterprise.  

“Prior to Agent 365, you needed to go into multiple different areas to see and manage an agent’s reach,” says de Longchamps. “First, Microsoft 365 admin to see identity and access management pieces, then Power Platform admin to see agents in Copilot Studio and then the Azure management portal to see more custom workloads. Seeing end-to-end was tricky. Agent 365 brings that into one place, so you can see all your agents across the business.” 

Agent 365 treats AI agents like virtual people, assigning each one an ID and allowing you to view them as if they were employees. You can see and manage their data access wherever they work across the enterprise. The app consists of five capabilities:  

• Identity and access control 
• A registry component 
• A set of visualisation tools that help you see what each agent can connect to across the business and who is using them 
• A security management capability to protect agents from threats and manage attacks 
• An integration capability into wider Microsoft agentic tools like MCP servers for Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and Word 

“Let’s say someone builds a Copilot agent and unknowingly connects it to their local Dropbox or some other external source,” de Longchamps says. “With Agent 365, you can see that agent and limit its access. Or if the agent is behaving in a way that’s counter to what it should, or built in a non-compliant way, you can manage it as required.” 

Another major advantage of Agent 365, de Longchamps notes, is its interoperability with Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. “Businesses love and trust these existing, well-entrenched monitoring and management tools. When you have a large enterprise, it’s a complex ecosystem to integrate. Agent 365 natively connects to Defender and Purview and brings it all together.”  

Is your organisation a Frontier Firm or aspiring to be one? Datacom can support your business on its AI journey, using the tools that suit your organisation. Across Datacom, we have more than 30 AI offerings for businesses in Australia and New Zealand, working with a range of product and service providers.  

Datacom recently earned the Microsoft Copilot Specialisation, a credential that strengthens Agent 365’s AI-powered modernisation capabilities, signalling our ability to scale Copilot-enabled solutions across enterprise Azure environments. Agent 365 is currently available through Microsoft’s Frontier early‑access programme for AI innovations in Microsoft 365.

Learn more about how our Microsoft specialists can help your organisation.