Microsoft Ignite 2025 brought a wave of exciting updates for admins, focusing on enhanced visibility, control and efficiency in management of AI-powered experiences. Here’s a deeper dive into the key features released to public preview, general availability, or announced and planned for release in the coming weeks.
Copilot Control System – Management controls updates
Copilot Control System (CCS) is Microsoft’s integrated framework for governing and managing Microsoft 365 Copilot at scale. As organizations expand AI across their workforce, CCS provides a unified way to secure data, manage access, and measure business impact. Let’s break down some of the key management controls updates and what they mean for your Copilot deployment strategy.
New home page for AI admins
Last year, we announced the availability of the Microsoft Entra AI Administrator role with authorizations scoped to manage Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents and related AI services in your organization. As AI admins continue to play a central role in driving AI adoption and value in your organizations, we continue to invest in admin experiences to support this important role. AI admins now have a new dedicated Microsoft 365 admin center home page offering:
- an at-a-glance view of key organization-level AI metrics
- pointers to key AI admin surfaces
- curated educational and inspirational AI resources from Microsoft.
Copilot overview section redesign
Since the initial release of the Copilot overview section in the Microsoft 365 admin center, your feedback has been clear: Copilot management needs to be centralized, comprehensive, and contextual. The redesigned overview section provides a more unified set of insights specific to your environment state and configurations, and the most relevant recommended actions for Copilot Chat, agents and Microsoft 365 Copilot. These insights and actions span across all three Copilot Control System pillars, namely Security and governance, Management controls, Measurement and reporting, to help you drive successful AI adoption in your organization. This redesigned Copilot overview experience announced at Ignite is now in Private Preview, and targeted for general availability in January 2025.
Copilot readiness settings: structured guidance for Copilot configuration
At Ignite, we also announced a new readiness page in Copilot settings, also planned for rollout in January. The new page offers a more structured, centralized way for admins to manage the growing set of configurations, policies, and controls that shape a successful Copilot deployment.
As Copilot expanded, the simple settings list view became too limited, not because it lacked information, but because AI admins need clearer guidance, organization, and visibility across a growing landscape of controls and configurations. The readiness page addresses this by organizing Microsoft‑recommended controls into predefined, meaningful categories, namely: deployment essentials, end‑user experience, and data security, making it easier to understand scope, prioritize actions, and track progress.
With completion status, user coverage insights, and clear explanations for each control, admins can confidently plan, sequence, and implement Microsoft 365 Copilot in a more coherent and structured way. It also surfaces new or recommended actions, like enabling image generation, with simple guidance that helps ensure users get the full value of Copilot features, and what they expect from modern AI experiences.
Organizational messages improvements: Enhanced audience targeting and Email as a delivery channel
Organizational messages in the Microsoft 365 admin center helps IT teams drive Copilot and agent awareness and adoption by reaching users through the Microsoft products they use every day. Since the GA release of Organizational messages at Ignite last year, we’ve heard two important themes from you: 1) a need to more intelligently target users based on activity and 2) support for email as communication channel. At Ignite 2025, we announced two key enhancements planned for general availability in Q1 2026:
- Action segments (Preview): with Action segments, target messages based on user behavior. For instance, you can select “Inactive Microsoft 365 Copilot users” or “Inactive Copilot users in Teams” and send them educational prompts or onboarding guidance. Public Preview began in mid-November 2025 with two pre-defined segments and will target general availability in March 2026. Since action segments are additive to existing policies, they complement existing targeting, such as by location, department or role.
- Email delivery channel (Preview): Organizational messages can now be delivered via email, alongside Windows Taskbar, Windows notifications, Spotlight and Teams popover messages. With email as a delivery channel, admins can send premade email templates, such as “Welcome to Copilot” and weekly “Great M365 Copilot Journey” mails, to boost adoption. Note that the preview experience includes only templatized messages, and customizable emails are planned for GA in March 2026. Enabling email in organizational messages allows admins to communicate with users through familiar channels, driving awareness and ensuring consistent messaging across devices.
Agent 365 - Agent management in Microsoft 365 admin center
Microsoft Agent 365 is the new control plane that enables organizations to deploy, organize and govern agents at scale, complementing the capabilities CCS provides for Microsoft 365 Copilot. It integrates identity, compliance, and security from Microsoft Entra, and Defender, and provides unified observability through dashboards and alerts. The Microsoft 365 admin center serves as your primary entry point for Agent 365 where you’ll find a growing set of agent management controls capabilities.
Customers can start exploring Agent 365 today through the Frontier early access program . Learn more at the Microsoft Agent 365 web page.
Agent overview – your agents console
The new Agent Overview page in Microsoft 365 admin center gives admins a single, powerful dashboard for visibility and insights across all their agents. Many of you told us, “I can’t tell what agents we have, whether they’re helping, or what needs my attention.” Agent Overview solves exactly that. It highlights key metrics such as total agents, unique active users, and even hours saved, making impact instantly clear. You’ll also find rich analytics, including top trending agents, usage patterns over time, and breakdowns by publisher or platform. The page surfaces Top Actions that require attention, like pending access requests, flagged risky agents, ownerless agents, or agents with exceptions, so you always know where to focus and can quickly review, approve, or intervene where it matters most.
Agent Registry – all agents in one place, powered by Microsoft Entra
The Agent registry gives AI admins a single, trusted place to discover, govern, and manage every agent in their tenant. No more hunting across disconnected tools. You've told us you need one trusted registry with rich metadata and lifecycle actions. That’s exactly what this delivers. Powered by Microsoft Entra ID, the unified registry surfaces all agents including Copilot Studio, Agent Builder, SharePoint, M365 Agent SDK, AI Foundry, Data Fabric, Entra‑only registrations, Microsoft‑provided agents, internally built agents, and even third‑party ones.
For each agent, review rich metadata like status, usage, sessions, exception rates, and last update dates and much more. You can sort and filter by publisher, channel, platform, or availability, and take lifecycle actions directly from the registry, such as blocking, deleting, or updating an agent. Deep security integration with Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Entra, and Microsoft Defender highlights risky agents, outdated configurations, and active security detections. And when you click into any agent, you get a full 360‑degree view: an overview with its name, description, and publisher; data and tools including grounding data, MCP tools, connectors, and knowledge sources; security and compliance details with applied policies and protections; granular Entra permissions; and activity analytics showing usage and exceptions.
Agent registry in the Microsoft 365 admin center is your central pane for agent discovery, security, and lifecycle management across the enterprise. Your agent registry is available today in the Microsoft 365 admin center via Copilot > Agents. Customers in the Frontier program can access it via Agents > All agents.
Agent ownership reassignment – Identify and assign agent ownership
Maintaining clear ownership of AI agents is essential for strong governance, continuity, and security, yet agents can easily become “ownerless” when employees change roles or leave the organization. Unmanaged agents introduce compliance gaps, increase operational overhead, and create blind spots for IT teams. To solve this, we've introduced a simple workflow for ownerless agent management to quickly identify, triage, and act on unmanaged agents. Now available in the Microsoft 365 admin center, admins can block, reassign, or retire these agents directly from Agents → All agents → Registry, using the Missing an owner card to quickly filter and manage them.
Agent Pinning
Pinning agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot gives people instant access to the most relevant AI capabilities for their roles, whether that’s a Sales coach agent for sellers or a workflow‑specific agent for Finance. With new admin agent pinning controls, now available in the Microsoft 365 admin center, AI administrators can now centrally curate and pin high‑value agents for the entire organization. Admins can also tailor the experience by pinning function‑specific agents for targeted users or security groups, helping teams start faster, stay focused, and get more done. This streamlined pinning experience empowers IT to guide adoption, highlight strategic agents, and make agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot more useful and discoverable from day one.
Agent enablement controls in agents settings
To help you manage agent adoption responsibility, you can utilize the agent enablement controls, now available under Agents > Settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center. These include controls to enable agents by security groups, enabling agent pilots or rollout by department. You can enable agents by agent publisher types (i.e. built by Microsoft, your organization, or by external publishers). Additionally, customers have expressed concerns about rapid org-wide propagation of user-created agents built with Agent Builder. To help you manage the sharing reach of these agents, you can now define which users in the organization are able to create org-wide sharing links.
Policy-driven agent management
Announced at Ignite and planned for release next month, agent policies brings powerful automation to agent management governance by applying a simple, intuitive “If This Then That” model to everyday agent management tasks.
With a rules-based interface, IT teams can define conditions and actions that automatically enforce policies, such as expiring agents that haven’t been used for 90 days or blocking ones flagged as risky and notifying security. These rules run continuously in the background, eliminating repetitive manual work while improving consistency and compliance. With full control, audit logging, and transparent visibility into every triggered action, this approach turns agent governance into an efficient, automated autopilot that keeps environments secure and well-managed.
Graph API support for agent management
Beyond UI-driven agent management, many customers have been clear about the need for deeper integration and automation for managing their agents at scale. With new Microsoft Graph API support, planned for Public Preview release next month, IT teams can now script and automate key oversight tasks, retrieving full agent inventories, filtering by attributes, and accessing rich metadata programmatically. Soon, this will go even further with support for updating agent states via PATCH operations and uploading or updating package files through POST endpoints, enabling true end‑to‑end lifecycle automation without launching into the UI. For organizations running hundreds or thousands of agents, these APIs will make it possible to integrate agent governance into existing approval pipelines and automation frameworks, bringing even more scalability and consistency to the agent management practice.
Managing MCP servers
We've also introduced capabilities for managing MCP servers in the Microsoft 365 admin center, now available to customers in the Frontier program. This new experience gives AI admins a centralized way to view and control all MCP servers across their organization. With a dedicated Tools page, admins can easily monitor availability, manage access, and ensure compliance, helping them govern how agents interact with user data, workflows, and business systems. Customers gain clearer visibility into tools that power Copilot and agent experiences such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 Calendar MCP servers, with simple actions like Block and Unblock to maintain policy alignment. Filters and rich metadata make it easy to quickly assess tool status, type, and publisher, simplifying operational oversight. Ultimately, this capability helps organizations maintain security, consistency, and trust as they scale agent‑based productivity.
Managing agents with MCP server connections
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a foundational architecture for integrating tools and APIs with Copilot and agents, enabling developers and makers to build agents that deliver richer, more flexible experiences. MCP servers act as standardized endpoints, exposing callable actions that agents can leverage to interact with data and services across Microsoft 365 and beyond. For admins, having visibility into these MCP-powered agents is essential for maintaining governance, compliance, and trust.
Starting this month, agents built on MCP servers appear in the Microsoft 365 admin center Copilot > Agents> Inventory (note: for customers in the Frontier program, they appear under Agents > All agents > Registry). Admins can easily view all MCP-enabled agents, access detailed metadata—including capabilities, data sources, and supported actions, and drill into the specifics of the MCP server powering each agent. By clicking on an MCP server-enabled agent, admins can navigate to a dedicated details section that surfaces the server’s URL, authentication type, and dynamic/static status. As MCP server agents become a core part of the Copilot ecosystem, this visibility helps AI admins continue to drive agent adoption securely and at scale.
Maximizing Copilot and agent performance with Cloud Update
Cloud Update, now generally available, modernizes how organizations manage Microsoft 365 Apps by automating updates and ensuring devices stay current, secure, and consistent. This cloud‑driven servicing model is especially important for Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents because maintaining high update currency ensures they run on optimized, secure, and feature‑ready environments.
By reducing operational overhead through automated monthly service, admins can focus less on manual maintenance and more on delivering the latest AI experiences. Cloud Update also helps organizations address compatibility concerns at scale while preparing their environments for the demands of AI‑driven workloads. Ultimately, it provides the consistent foundation required for Copilot and agents to deliver accurate, predictable, and secure assistance across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Conclusion and resources
As we close out this year, we want to extend our sincere gratitude to our incredible admin community. Your partnership, feedback, and commitment continue to shape admin experiences in meaningful ways. Thanks to you, we’ve made tremendous strides across Microsoft 365, Copilot and agents management, and we’re even more energized for what’s ahead. Together, we’re building momentum for a strong and innovative 2026, and we can’t wait to take the next steps forward with you.
Actions:
Learn more about Copilot Control System
Learn more and get early access to Agent 365
Watch the Ignite session: IT Excellence in the AI era
Blog: Get latest on Copilot and Agent Analytics from Ignite 2025
Blog: Learn about Security and Governance innovations for M365 Copilot and agents from Ignite 2025
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