Ignite 2025 Beyond the Data Platform: How Microsoft Is Turning Everything Into an Agent Platform

Microsoft Ignite 2025 is officially the “Frontier firm” show—agents everywhere, all at once. If you’ve been tracking the data platform news (Fabric, databases, OneLake), you already know that story. This post looks at the rest of the landscape: Windows, Microsoft 365, Teams, Edge, security, Azure infra, and the growing partner ecosystem that’s rapidly filling in the agent-shaped gaps.

I’ll walk through the major non‑data platform announcements and highlight where Microsoft and partners are quietly reshaping the application, OS, and security layers around #Copilot, #AgenticAI, and #MSIgnite. Then we’ll close with what this means for architects and teams trying to build something coherent on top of all of this.

From Apps to Agents: Agent 365 and the New Control Plane

The core Ignite message is simple: agents are the new apps, and they need first‑class management.

Agent 365: control plane for AI agents

Microsoft Agent 365 is the anchor announcement on the non‑data side. It lives in the Microsoft 365 admin center and extends the familiar user/device governance stack (Entra ID, Defender, Purview, M365 admin) to AI agents.

Key concepts:

• Registry – an inventory of all agents in your tenant (including “shadow” agents over time), with the ability to quarantine those you don’t want in production workflows.
• Access control – risk‑based conditional access and policy templates so agents are treated like first‑class identities, not random scripts.
• Visualization – a map of how agents interact with people, other agents, and resources, which is going to matter as “agent sprawl” becomes a real operational problem.
• Interoperability & security – deep integration with Work IQ, Microsoft 365 apps, Defender, Entra, and Purview so actions, context, and guardrails stay aligned.

Agent 365 is available now through the Frontier early access program for customers with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Vertical agents: sales, people, learning, and admin

On top of Agent 365, Microsoft announced a stack of “built‑in” agents that will matter to line‑of‑business and IT teams:

• Sales Development Agent – a fully autonomous sales agent that researches, qualifies, and engages leads, handing off to humans when it makes sense. Available via Frontier.
• Workforce Insights, People, and Learning Agents – powered by Work IQ, these focus on workforce analytics, people discovery, and micro‑learning / upskilling aligned to roles and org goals.
• Teams Admin Agent – automates tasks like meeting monitoring and user provisioning in the Teams admin center.
• SharePoint Admin Agent – This is an exciting tool for anyone who’s ever spent way to long on SharePoint admin work! It watches for inactive/ownerless sites, oversharing, and permission sprawl and can apply policies or archiving actions automatically.

These aren’t just point features; they’re early examples of what “agent as a managed workload” looks like when it’s implemented across the Microsoft 365 stack.

Agents inside Teams and across Foundry

Agents also show up directly in collaboration and developer tooling:

• Agents in Teams channels can now work with third‑party apps and agents via Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers—GitHub, Asana, Jira, and others. Ask the agent about project blockers; it pulls risks from Jira and schedules a mitigation meeting in Teams.
• Foundry Agent Service (in preview) gives developers hosted agents with built‑in memory, multi‑agent workflows, and autoscaling, plus integration back into Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 apps. It supports Microsoft’s Agent Framework, LangGraph, CrewAI, and similar frameworks.

If you think in platform terms, Ignite 2025 is where Microsoft starts to make “agent fleet management” a concrete architectural building block rather than a slideware concept. #AgenticAI

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Modern Work: Copilot, Work IQ, Teams, and SharePoint

If 2023–2024 was about adding Copilot buttons to apps, 2025 is about treating Microsoft 365 as a mesh of agents and an intelligence layer.

Work IQ and Office‑level agents

Microsoft formalized Work IQ as the intelligence layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. Work IQ blends:

• Your work graph (emails, meetings, files, chats)
• Memory (preferences, patterns, relationships)
• Inference (how it chooses the “right” agent, prompt, or action next)

On top of that, Microsoft is shipping dedicated Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents, accessible from Copilot Chat and “Agent Mode” inside the apps:

• You start in chat with a prompt; the agent asks follow‑ups, then creates a document, spreadsheet, or deck tailored to your intent.
• In‑app, Agent Mode can handle research, structure, layout, and refinement using models from OpenAI or Anthropic, depending on the scenario.(Source)

This is where everyday knowledge work becomes “chat‑first, app‑refined” instead of “file‑first with optional AI assist.”

Copilot platform enhancements

Several Microsoft 365 Copilot updates quietly matter a lot for adoption:

• Voice in Microsoft 365 Copilot is now generally available for commercial customers—“Hey Copilot” and seamless switching between voice and text on desktop and mobile.
• Copilot Pages lets Copilot Chat generate interactive pages (including code for visualizations and simple apps) that can then be iterated and even converted to PowerPoint decks.
• Copilot Notebooks gain sharing, overview pages, and AI‑driven video/audio summaries, all available to Frontier customers.

Teams: from meeting hub to agent hub

Teams didn’t get top billing in the keynote, but the updates matter:

• A new “Teams Mode” for Microsoft 365 Copilot lets users move from solo chats to collaborative, group‑style interactions with AI that are aware of chats, channels, and meetings.
• Additional meeting and webinar features focus on richer summarization, better external collaboration, and tighter integration with Copilot across Teams workloads.

Combine that with MCP‑powered agents in channels and Teams starts to look more like an orchestration surface for human–agent collaboration than “just chat and meetings.”

SharePoint and knowledge‑centric agents

On the content side, SharePoint gets three key upgrades:

• Copilot reasoning over SharePoint metadata means prompts grounded in document libraries can yield more precise answers, especially in structured scenarios like product catalogs or regulated content.
• SharePoint page and list creation from Copilot Chat lets users ask Copilot (via @sharepoint page/list agents) to spin up structured lists or pages directly from natural language prompts.

Azure Copilot: agentic cloud operations

Azure Copilot moves into its next phase with specialized agents embedded in the Azure portal, PowerShell, and CLI, now in private preview.

Highlights:

• Chat becomes a full‑screen command center for deployment, migration, cost and carbon optimization, observability, and resiliency.
• Agents are driven by GPT‑5‑class reasoning over ARM templates and Azure resources, with tight integration to GitHub Copilot for code‑level modernization.
• Enterprise safeguards include role‑based controls, explicit confirmation before changes, and baked‑in security posture checks.

This is where “agentic cloud ops” becomes concrete: AI doesn’t just generate YAML; it plans and executes infra changes within policy and with traceability.

Infra innovations: Azure Boost and Cobalt 200

Two low‑level announcements worth noting before they get lost in the AI noise:

• Azure Boost – the latest generation (preview) now supports up to 20 Gbps remote storage throughput, ~1M remote storage IOPS, and 400 Gbps network bandwidth, with hardware‑based isolation between Boost infrastructure and customer workloads.
• Azure Cobalt 200 – the next‑generation Arm‑based CPU with up to 50% higher performance than Cobalt 100, on TSMC’s 3nm process, and positioned as Azure’s most power‑efficient compute platform with integrated HSM and Boost.

If you’re planning high‑throughput, agent‑heavy workloads that still care about latency and cost, these underpin a lot of what will be possible.

Reimagined Microsoft Marketplace

The reimagined Microsoft Marketplace—with a heavy emphasis on AI apps and agents—is now globally available after its initial US launch. Microsoft describes it as the largest catalog of AI apps and agents, tightly integrated with the Microsoft Cloud.

This matters because Agent 365, Foundry, Security Copilot, and Marketplace together form an ecosystem loop: build agents, govern them, sell/discover them, and secure them in a unified stack.

Security and Governance: Ambient, Autonomous, and Agent‑Aware

Security is where Microsoft leans hardest into the “agentic era” language.

Agent‑centric security stack

The “Ambient and autonomous security for the agentic era” announcements pull several pieces together:

• Agent 365 is framed explicitly as a security and governance surface for agents (inventory, quarantine, policies, and monitoring).
• Foundry Control Plane adds security‑aware lifecycle management for agents, tying Defender, Entra, and Purview into the developer experience.
• A new Security Dashboard for AI aggregates signals from Defender, Entra, and Purview to give CISOs a unified view of AI agents, apps, and associated risks.

Purview also extends controls around Copilot usage—oversharing reports, bulk remediation for overshared links, DLP for Copilot prompts, and automated deletion for sensitive Teams transcripts.

Security Copilot and Sentinel: agentic defense

Security Copilot moves from optional add‑on to more of a baseline:

• Security Copilot agents are being embedded across Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview to triage incidents, tune conditional access, and maintain endpoint and data hygiene.
• Security Copilot is now included for Microsoft 365 E5 customers, with a pool of Security Compute Units (SCUs) allocated per 1,000 users and PAYG options for scaling later.

On the SIEM side, Microsoft Sentinel is positioned as an agentic security platform, combining its SIEM capability with a purpose‑built security data lake and powering Security Copilot agents.

Defender, Entra, Intune, and Baseline Security Mode

Additional pieces worth noting:

• Defender predictive shielding uses graph insights and threat intel to anticipate likely attacker pivot paths and proactively harden them.
• Integration between Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security aims to close the loop from code to runtime, with Copilot Autofix on the developer side and validation in Defender.
• Baseline Security Mode, now generally available, gives organizations prescriptive “secure‑by‑default” settings with what‑if simulation and dashboards.
• Intune gains new Copilot agents and improved rollout controls (phased deployments, remote recovery environment management, and maintenance windows) to make AI rollouts less risky.

Finally, there’s a new Security Store, generally available, to help customers discover security solutions (including partner‑built agents and integrations) across the Microsoft ecosystem.

The consistent theme: if agents are everywhere, security has to be both ambient (across OS, cloud, and apps) and autonomous (agentic defense to match agentic workloads).

So What? How to Think About Ignite 2025’s Non‑Data Announcements

Putting this all together, Ignite 2025 draws three clear lines for anyone architecting on the Microsoft stack:

• Agents are the default interaction model.
  From Word/Excel/PowerPoint agents and Teams channel agents to Azure Copilot for infra and Security Copilot for defense, the expectation is that you’ll increasingly interact with systems via agents rather than static UIs or scripts.
• Control planes matter more than ever.
  Agent 365, Foundry Control Plane, Security Dashboard for AI, and Windows/Edge agent surfaces are all about giving you a way to see, govern, and secure this growing digital workforce.
• Hybrid and local AI are becoming first‑class.
  Copilot+ PCs, Windows AI APIs, Edge Copilot Mode, Belt Desktop, and Azure infra all point to a future where you mix local NPU workloads with cloud‑scale agents instead of choosing one or the other.

If you’re following Ignite from the standpoint of data and analytics, the non‑data platform story is still your story—because this is the surface your data‑driven solutions will live on, be governed in, and ultimately be experienced through.

A practical lens

Coming out of Ignite, a pragmatic to‑do list for most organizations would include:

• Map your current “shadow agents.” Even before Agent 365, list where you already have scripts, bots, copilots, or connectors acting semi‑autonomously.
• Decide where agents should live. For sales, HR, support, security, infra, and productivity, ask: do we want Microsoft‑authored agents, partner solutions, or custom agents on Foundry?
• Align security and governance early. Treat agents like identities and applications: they need lifecycle management, policy, monitoring, and clear accountability.

Ignite 2025 didn’t just bring more features; it brought a more opinionated architecture: OS, browser, cloud, security, and modern work all converging on an agentic pattern. The sooner your roadmaps acknowledge that, the less retrofitting you’ll be doing in 12–24 months.