At Microsoft, we envision a future where organizations become Frontier firms by using AI to unlock creativity and innovation, allowing the next great ideas to surface. Today at Ignite, we introduced new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help every customer become Frontier.
Key announcements include:
- Work IQ—the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot to know you, your job, and your company inside and out.
- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in chat—alongside Agent Mode in the Office apps—enable you to work iteratively with Copilot to deliver high-quality Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
- Agent 365—the control plane for agents—enables you to manage and secure agents with confidence.
Microsoft 365 Copilot with Work IQ: AI built for work
At Microsoft, we believe that all great ideas start with human ambition, which can be accessed and unlocked using the capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot and an agent ecosystem.
Work IQ amplifies your IQ. It’s the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to know how you work, with whom you work and the content you collaborate on. Built on your data, memory and inference, it connects to the rich company knowledge in your emails, files, meetings and chats, plus your preferences, habits, work patterns and relationships. It allows Copilot to make connections, unlock insights and predict the next best action based on native integrations, not a patchwork of third-party connectors. And now, you can tap into the expertise of Work IQ with APIs to build agents tuned to your unique workflows and business needs.
Work IQ also is powering many of the updates across Microsoft 365 Copilot announced at Ignite today.
Ubiquitous innovation and intelligence
In a Frontier firm, there are makers in every room of the house. People on the frontlines are closest to the work problems that need to be solved. They can create agents to help them in their day-to-day work.
How do AI agents know what to do with your data? Foundry IQ and Fabric IQ help AI agents understand what users are doing, bridge the gap between raw data and real-world business meaning and find the context to make decisions.
Fabric IQ brings together analytical, time series and location-based data with your operational systems under one shared model tied to business meaning. This gives you a live, connected view of your business, so both people and AI can act in real time. If you are a customer who is already using Power BI for your business intelligence reporting, all of that pre-existing data modeling work will act as an immediate accelerant, giving your agents the unique context that defines how your business runs.
Foundry IQ takes this further with a fully managed knowledge system designed to ground AI agents over multiple data sources — including Microsoft 365 (Work IQ), Fabric IQ, custom applications and the web. This single endpoint for knowledge has routing and intelligence built in, enabling higher-quality reasoning, safer actions and more value for builders.
Microsoft Agent Factory is a program that brings these agent IQ layers together to help organizations build agents with confidence. With a single metered plan, customers can start building with IQ using Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio. They can deploy their agents anywhere, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, with no upfront licensing and provisioning required. Eligible organizations can also tap into hands-on support from top AI Forward Deployed Engineers and access tailored role-based training to boost AI fluency across teams.
Updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot include:
Last month we brought vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in the Office apps. Now you can create world-class Office artifacts whether you start in Copilot chat or in the apps. With Agent Mode in Excel, users can now choose between Anthropic and Open AI reasoning models. Agent Mode in Word is now generally available, and Agent Mode in PowerPoint is now available via the Frontier Program. And new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents allow you to create high-quality documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Copilot chat. Available via the Frontier Program.
Now you can talk to Copilot like a colleague with voice in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. From your phone, ask Copilot, “what are my top priorities for the day” or “catch me up on the meeting I missed” (generally available in December). Copilot in Outlook makes it easy to triage your inbox and calendar on the go using just your voice (in public preview). You can also quickly read and reply to emails with new one-tap prompts like “summarize and reply,” and schedule meetings—all from your phone (generally available).
Copilot Chat is your secure AI chat for work, available to every Microsoft 365 subscriber at no additional cost. And soon, it will include access to Agent Mode in chat and the Office apps and Copilot in Outlook will understand your inbox and calendar. Coming in Preview in early 2026.
Sora 2 brings next-generation AI video creation to work. Using Create, now you can make, edit, and share short-form videos for marketing or social content. Available via the Frontier Program.
Edge for Business is already trusted by top customers for the majority of their browsing minutes, and with Copilot Mode enabled, it becomes the secure enterprise AI browser. Multi-step workflows are enabled with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license—with multi-tab reasoning coming soon via the Frontier Program.
We’re making human-agent teamwork a reality. Teams Mode for Microsoft 365 Copilot turns your 1:1 Copilot chats into group chats in Teams (in public preview). We also introduced collaboration-focused agents for Copilot—giving every team, project, and meeting an AI teammate. Facilitator agent in Teams drives the agenda, takes notes, keeps meetings on track, and even helps manage actions from the meeting (generally available). Now, agents in Teams Channels can work with third-party apps and agents via MCP servers, such as GitHub, Asana, and Atlassian (Jira). For example, a user can ask the agent in a Teams channel about blockers and mitigation plans for an upcoming product launch, and the agent will pull risks directly from JIRA then schedule a meeting with the team (in public preview).
Agent 365: the control plane for agents
Agents are already changing how people work. By 2028, businesses are projected to have[1] 1.3 billion AI agents automating workflows. Most organizations don’t yet have a way to observe, secure or govern them — if not governed, AI agents are the new shadow IT.
Microsoft Agent 365 enables you to observe, manage and secure your AI agents, whether the agents are created with Microsoft platforms, open-source frameworks or third-party platforms.
It equips them with many of the same apps and protections as people, tailored to agent needs, saving IT time and effort on integrating agents into business processes. It includes the Microsoft security solutions Defender, Entra, Purview and Foundry Control Plane to protect and govern agents, productivity tools including Microsoft 365 apps and Work IQ to help people work more efficiently and Microsoft 365 admin center to manage agents.
A365 includes five key capabilities:
- A registry to give you a single source of truth for all the agents in your organization
- Access control to manage agents and limit their access to only the resources required to perform specific tasks
- Visualization—a unified dashboard and advanced analytics to see connections between agents, people, and data, and monitor agent behavior and performance in real time
- Interoperability to equip agents with apps and data to simplify human-agent workflows
- Security to help protect agents from threats and vulnerabilities and detect, investigate, and remediate attacks that target agents
Agent 365 unites intelligence, security, and governance to unleash powerful agentic capabilities with the security you rely on from Microsoft. Available via the Frontier Program.
Other Microsoft 365 updates
We’re introducing 12 new Microsoft Security Copilot agents built into the everyday flow of work for security teams, available in Microsoft Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview. And Microsoft Security Copilot will be included for all Microsoft 365 customers so every organization can harness the power of these agents. These changes begin rolling out today for Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue rolling out to all Microsoft 365 E5 licensed customers in the coming months.
We’re committed to helping every organization harness the power to use AI to grow and scale their business. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is a new offer to bring every small and medium-sized business AI built for work. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is available for businesses with fewer than 300 users for $21 per user per month, starting in December.
This is only a small selection of the many exciting features and updates we will be announcing at Ignite. As a reminder, you can view keynote sessions from Microsoft executives, including Judson Althoff, Scott Guthrie, Charles Lamanna, Asha Sharma and Ryan Roslansky, live or on-demand.
Plus, you can get more on all these announcements by exploring the Book of News, the official compendium of all today’s news.
Related:
Partners leading the AI transformation: Microsoft Ignite 2025 recap
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[1] IDC Info Snapshot, sponsored by Microsoft, 1.3 Billion AI Agents by 2028, May 2025 #US53361825
