Microsoft Build 2025: How to create a “frontier” workplace powered by agents

As we kick off Microsoft Build 2025, we have a new vision of how humans and AI-powered agents will collaborate—and the blueprint for how it’s already taking shape. Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index Annual Report reveals the arrival of the “Frontier Firm,” which is structured around AI, on-demand intelligence, and teams of humans and agents. 

Our report shows that workers at Frontier Firms are more likely to say their company is thriving, that they’re able to accomplish more, and that they’re doing more meaningful work. Many organizations plan to follow the lead of these firms. Over 80% of leaders say they expect agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company’s AI strategy in the next 12-18 months, according to the report.  

These findings reflect the momentum we see with Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents among customers and partners. Our ecosystem includes hundreds of software development companies that are building agents, and tens of thousands of enterprises that are extending Copilot with line-of-business (LOB) agents. 

In this post, I’ll provide examples of leading-edge use cases from these companies, share resources you can use to create your own agentic teams, highlight new capabilities and features, and pinpoint sessions at Build with more in-depth guidance for developers and IT admins. 

Copilot Chat and the Agent Store connect employees and agents to supercharge productivity 

The center of the new agentic workplace is Copilot Chat, located in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Copilot Chat is where people can find agents and direct their new digital teams. Employees can pin the agents they work with most and easily create their own custom agents to help with their specific tasks, providing a single access point for the agents they use daily. 

In the new Agent Store, available in Copilot Chat, people can access prebuilt agents from Microsoft, find their company’s custom agents, and search for agents built by leading software companies. The store enables software companies to monetize their agents and surface them directly where customers are working, which boosts discovery and usage.

At Build we're announcing the new Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning feature, which will enable customers to train Copilot’s large language model (LLM) with their own data. This provides agents with more context and organizational awareness so they can perform domain-specific tasks with a high degree of accuracy, without compromising security, governance, and manageability. Customers can get early access to this feature, which will launch in mid-June, through the Copilot Tuning Program. 

Measuring the performance of agentic teams is crucial, and now Copilot Analytics provides a holistic view. IT admins can check agent reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Usage to see the agents that are being used the most, revealing which ones are most effective. 

In addition, the public preview of an integration between Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Viva Insights can provide leaders with an ROI analysis of agents built using Copilot Studio, the end-to-end agent platform. This new analysis dashboard offers a streamlined way to track agent adoption and measure their impact across the enterprise. To enable it, simply allow the integration in the Microsoft Power Platform admin center. 

Examples of success from Microsoft’s expanding ecosystem of agents 

Many enterprises are already using Copilot and LOB agents to automate key business processes, scale the workforce, and empower employees to focus on more strategic and rewarding work. 

• General Motors is leveraging a Copilot agent designed to interact with sales consultants, keeping them informed about the new advanced in-vehicle technology available in GM vehicles. The agent can provide insights to sales consultants on available OnStar services based on vehicle information. 
• Holland America is handling thousands of weekly conversations with their customer service agent, achieving a high resolution rate and reducing basic queries to call centers. 
• NOVARTIS' clinical studies team is leveraging Copilot to streamline reporting and shifting focus to analyzing results and strategizing future studies. 
• Textron developed a suite of agents to reduce documentation development time associated with high-severity outages within the IT Service Management team, with the goal of improving the quality, completeness, and response times for creation of key documents.  
• The Verdantas Pursuit Agent empowers teams by enabling project intelligence across enterprise data sources. It streamlines access to resumes, RFPs, financials, and client history—boosting efficiency and win rates. 

Our partners are also developing agents that extend the capabilities of Copilot for specific tasks and enhance work for their customers. I’ve highlighted a handful of compelling examples below, and you can check out more in this demo gallery of AI experiences.  

• Cornerstone OnDemand's CSOD agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot assists employees in finding courses in the flow of work in Copilot Chat and within Office apps such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 
• Icertis has built a contracting agent for Microsoft Teams that enables users to effortlessly search for contracts, dive deep into contract details, and take actions such as approving contracts. 
• LSEG’s Excel-integrated Workspace app will empower financial services professionals to discover, visualize, and reuse financial data with ease—enhancing decision-making, collaboration, and productivity through AI-driven insights and secure Microsoft 365 tools. 
• The Moveworks agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot streamlines tasks like IT and HR requests by integrating agentic AI with enterprise systems—boosting productivity, reducing context switching, and enhancing employee experiences. 
• S&P Global data now integrates with Microsoft 365, delivering critical research—like Commodity Insights—into Copilot, SharePoint, Outlook, and Teams to boost productivity and decision-making within familiar workflows. 

These examples are just the beginning—agentic use cases will become more sophisticated and powerful now that autonomous agents are generally available. With natural language instructions, these agents can monitor and react to triggering events and automatically carry out workflows, vastly expanding what employees—and entire enterprises—can accomplish. 

Advancing the potential of agents with new capabilities in Copilot Studio and support for MCP and A2A protocol 

With pro-code, low-code, and no-code options, Copilot Studio is a great tool for end users, makers, and developers to begin their journey with agents. It allows users to configure and customize prebuilt agents, develop agents with the simple interface of Copilot Studio agent builder, and create autonomous agents. Developers can also add more functionality to existing agents developed with Copilot Studio using Microsoft 365 Agents Software Development Kit (SDK), a comprehensive framework for building enterprise-grade agents. 

As agents take on more sophisticated roles, they need access to external data sources, tools, and other networks of agents. That’s why we recently announced our commitment to the Agent2Agent (A2A) open protocol, which will enable collaboration across clouds, platforms, and organizations. Beginning soon in public preview, Copilot Studio agents will be able to securely invoke external agents built on other platforms or hosted outside Microsoft.  

This new functionality is in addition to our support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Copilot Studio. MCP is another open protocol that simplifies how LLMs and agents interact with external data and tools. With MCP, enterprises can provide additional tools and data to agents, integrate custom internal APIs and external data providers into Copilot Studio, and easily tap into prebuilt, MCP-enabled connectors in the marketplace. 

We are also launching a capability called computer use for Copilot Studio agents through our Frontier program, which offers previews of new experiences. Computer use allows agents to interact with any system that has a graphical user interface, turning websites and desktop apps into tools for the agent to accomplish tasks independently. The computer use preview will be available in U.S. environments for customers that have purchased 500,000 Copilot Studio messages. 

In addition to the new Copilot Studio features, Microsoft 365 Copilot APIs enable developers to use key components of the Copilot stack, such as retrieval, chat and meeting, so they can tap into the rich organizational data and capabilities in Microsoft 365 while maintaining tenant boundary security. These enterprise-ready APIs are in public preview.   

How to manage and govern agents in Microsoft 365 

With enterprise users adopting agents, scalable governance becomes even more critical. Microsoft 365’s built-in administrative tools include centralized oversight in the Microsoft 365 admin center and environmental control for testing and development in the Power Platform admin center. Agents are also integrated into enterprise information protection policies by default. Read our Agent Governance Whitepaper for more resources on agent management.   

We’re also providing new tools for IT admins in the Copilot Control System. For example, new agent management features in the Microsoft 365 admin center allow enterprises to enable, disable, or block agents from specific users or groups. In public preview in June, the apps and agents tab in Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI provides a dashboard to govern agents with full control over data classification, protection policies, and access.  

For more in-depth information on how to build and manage agents, check out these recorded sessions at Build. 

• Building agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot 
• Create agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK 
• Introducing the Agent Store: Build agents and publish them in the Agent Store for Microsoft 365 Copilot 
• Add more knowledge to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Copilot connectors and actions 
• Build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio 
• Fine-tune models for task-specific agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot 

Learn more about Microsoft Build, agents, and Microsoft 365 Copilot 

We’re very excited about what customers and partners are creating with Copilot extensibility and agentic AI, and we’re eager to share more resources and insights at Build. We look forward to supporting you as you continue to break ground on the AI frontier.  

For more information about Copilot and agents, follow the links below.   

• Check out the Build homepage to learn more. 
• Get started building agents in the Microsoft 365 Dev Center with decision guides, code samples, documentation, and tutorials. 
• Build agents with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio. 
• Learn how to deploy agents for Copilot on our instructions page. 
• For more about Frontier Firms and the future of work, read the full 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report.