Better Together Series — Part 2
Better Together is a series on how Microsoft’s AI platforms work seamlessly to build, deploy, and manage intelligent agents at enterprise scale.
As organizations embrace AI across every workflow, Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Agent 365, and Microsoft Copilot Studio are coming together to deliver a unified approach—from development to deployment to day-to-day operations.
This three-part series explores how these technologies connect to help enterprises build AI agents that are secure, governed, and deeply integrated with Microsoft’s product ecosystem. This blog focuses on Part 2: Microsoft Foundry + A365Microsoft Agent 365 native Integration, showing how organizations can build, deploy, and customize Microsoft Agent 365 agents directly from Foundry.
What Is Microsoft Agent 365?
Microsoft Agent 365 is the control plane for enterprise AI agents, allowing IT to register, secure, and scale agents across Microsoft 365 and third-party environments.
AI agents act more like people than code—they bring skills, learn from context, and leverage enterprise data to complete tasks. Like with people in the enterprise, they need to be protected from digital threats, governed with the right IT controls, and managed following enterprise policies.
Our philosophy is simple: treat agents like users. Extend your existing identity, security, compliance, and productivity infrastructure to agents using familiar tools adapted for their unique needs. Each agent receives its own identity, policies, and access controls, ensuring it operates effectively while staying compliant.
With Agent 365, organizations can:
- Manage AI agents at scale with unified identity and lifecycle controls
- Enforce least-privilege access and compliance with Defender, Entra, and Purview
- Boost productivity through native integration with Microsoft 365 apps and Work IQ
- Monitor activity and apply policies from a single, secure registry
Learn more about Microsoft Agent 365
Foundry: The Ideal Place for Developers to Build AI Agents
Microsoft Foundry is the ideal platform for building, testing, and deploying Agent 365 agents. It provides a unified environment where developers can create enterprise-ready AI agents that are secure, governed, and fully integrated with Microsoft 365.
At Ignite, Foundry introduces support for Agent 365 hosted (containerized) agents, giving developers a consistent, scalable runtime managed entirely within the Microsoft cloud. This initial release focuses on hosted agents to provide a fully managed and secure environment from development to deployment.
With Foundry, developers can:
- Author agents quickly using low-code or pro-code workflows
- Test and iterate in a secure, hosted environment
- Integrate frontier AI models from Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek, and xAI
- Package and deploy agents with Microsoft identity, security, and governance built in
Through its native integration with Microsoft Agent 365, Foundry also provides:
- Foundry-hosted runtime for seamless agent execution
- Azure Bot Service and Microsoft 365 app integration (Teams, Outlook, M365 Copilot)
- MCP-connected tools from Microsoft Agent 365
- Simplified preparation flow for publishing to M365 Copilot, Teams and BizChat Apps
Together, Foundry and Microsoft Agent 365 let organizations build, host, and manage AI agents natively, making them enterprise-ready from day one.
What Can Employees Do with Agent 365?
With Agent 365, employees can:
- Automate email triage and meeting preparation
- Summarize and generate content
- Locate organizational knowledge instantly
- Orchestrate cross-system workflows and approvals
Advanced teams can also:
- Integrate internal knowledge bases
- Create business-specific workflows
- Extend actions using Foundry APIs and connectors
Why It Matters
This integration makes Agent 365 agents enterprise-ready out of the box—combining the authoring power of Microsoft Foundry with the security and manageability of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. IT retains control over policy, compliance, and lifecycle management, while business users gain intelligent agents that work across the tools they already use.
Get Started
Early access to Microsoft Agent 365 is available through the Frontier preview program, offering hands-on experience with Microsoft’s latest AI innovations.
🔗 [Quickstart — Publish an Agent to A365 GitHub Sample]
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