A Smarter Way to Work: Inside Microsoft 365 Agents

Chat-based AI assistants (like Copilot) have at this point been around for several years. While they are helpful as personal assistants, they are built for open-ended conversations that can lead in any number of directions. Users interact with these AI assistants through a series of prompts and responses. However, these assistants are often limited in the tasks they perform, other than generate text, provide summarizations and deliver query or search results. This has led to the rise of Agents – task-oriented AI assistants that can conduct more complex, multi-step workflows.

🆚 AI Assistant vs Agent

Here are some of the high-level differences between AI assistants and agents.

🏠 Agents Live Where You Live

While Microsoft has deployed several stand-alone agents, including the Researcher and Analyst agents, the company is now deploying various applications within the various Microsoft 365 workloads. For example:

  • The Project Manager agent works with Microsoft Planner.
  • The Excel and Word agents can create a new document “from scratch” or can update an existing document when running in “agent mode” inside the Office application.
  • The SharePoint page agent allows users to define the content of new pages and then add them to a SharePoint site.
  • The Knowledge agent allows users to carry out tasks within SharePoint such as using natural language to create views, auto-fill columns, clean-up site content, and more.
  • The Learning agent allows users to access Viva Learning content using natural language, while the People agent taps into your Entra ID org structure and Viva skills.

🖌️Creating Your Own Agent

You don’t just have to use Microsoft’s agents. You can also create your own agents using the following tools:

  • The App Builder and Workflows agents allow you to build custom apps and workflows using natural language.
  • The Agent Builder allows you to create a custom agent using Copilot Studio, but within the Copilot experience.
  • Copilot Studio, one of the low-code tools included in the Power Platform, allows you to create custom agents that can connect to multiple data sources.
  • Microsoft Foundry allows you to create fully custom agents.

đź“‹Agent 365

Microsoft recently unveiled Microsoft Agent 365, a unified control pane for managing the agents in your tenant. This tool, available in the Microsoft Admin Center, provides the following features:

  • Registry: a complete register of all the agents being used within your tenant, both pre-built and custom, and any agents being called by your agents.
  • Access Control: Offers the ability to limit what kind of access agents have, including risk-based conditional access policies.
  • Visualization: See in real-time what agents are being used, their metrics, and detailed information about each agent, including its publisher and connectivity.

⛵ Microsoft’s Frontier Program

The Microsoft Frontier program provides early access to new Copilot and AI features in your tenant, including Agent 365 and many of the new agents. The program is available to all Microsoft 365 customers with a Copilot license.

Tenant administrators can decide which users in their tenant can access these Frontier features. Microsoft 365 administrators can enable Copilot Frontier program access through the Copilot Settings page, User Access tab, in the Microsoft Admin Center.

🚀 Why Agents Matter: A New Era of Intelligent Workflows

Agents aren’t just another feature or tools —they’re a shift in how work gets done. They’re part of a broader strategy to ensure AI is powerful, trustworthy, and accessible across the workplace.

Key benefits

  • Consistency
  • Efficiency
  • Accessibility
  • Scalability
  • Security

They help organizations move from manual, repetitive work to intelligent, automated workflows that free people to focus on creativity, strategy, and connection.

As Microsoft continues to expand the capabilities of Agents—and advances frontier‑scale AI through the Frontier program—organizations gain a powerful new layer of intelligence woven directly into their daily tools.

Agents don’t replace people, they amplify them. And they’re only just getting started. Get in touch today, and let Savvy explore the possibilities with you!