Cloud operations are changing fast. At Ignite 2025, Microsoft is introducing a new wave of agentic capabilities within Azure Copilot—one of the key capabilities includes the optimization agent, designed to help you identify, validate, and act on opportunities.
In today’s cloud-first world, optimization is no longer a luxury—it’s a strategic imperative. As IT professionals and developers navigate increasingly complex environments, the need to reduce costs, improve sustainability, and accelerate decision-making has never been more urgent.
At Ignite 2025, Microsoft is introducing a new wave of agentic capabilities within Azure Copilot—one of the key capabilities includes the optimization agent, designed to help you identify, validate, and act on opportunities to streamline cloud operations. For FinOps teams, this agent becomes especially powerful, enabling cost governance, carbon insights, and actionable recommendations to maximize financial efficiency at scale.
From Complexity to Clarity
For users familiar with Azure’s cost and performance tools, the new operations center experience in the Azure Portal provides a unified agentic experience to monitor spend and carbon emissions side by side, surface the most critical optimization opportunities, and seamlessly trigger actions by invoking the Optimization agent—bringing governance, efficiency, and sustainability into one streamlined experience.
What’s New in Optimization
The optimization agent in Azure Copilot empowers teams to:
- Identify top actions prioritized by impact, cost savings, and ease of implementation.
- Evaluate cost and carbon impacts side-by-side, helping you make informed decisions that align with financial and sustainability goals.
- Validate recommendations with supporting evidence, current / projected utilization trends, and alternative SKU choices.
- Accelerate implementation with step-by-step guidance and agentic workflows that reduce toil and increase confidence.
These capabilities are designed to scale FinOps impact, enabling collaboration across engineering, finance, procurement, and sustainability teams—all within a unified experience.
A Day in the Life: FinOps in Action
Let’s step into the shoes of a FinOps practitioner at a large enterprise navigating the complexities of cost management.
It’s Monday morning. Over the weekend, a set of development VMs were left running, quietly accumulating costs. The optimization agent—a capability within Azure Copilot—surfaces a top action: resize or shut down the idle resources. With a few clicks, the practitioner reviews the supporting evidence, including usage trends, cost impact, and carbon footprint. The agent offers visibility over alternative SKUs and guides the practitioner through a step-by-step implementation—all within the same interface.
But it doesn’t stop there. For teams that prefer automation or scripting, the agent also generates Azure CLI and PowerShell scripts tailored to the recommended action. This gives practitioners flexibility: they can execute changes directly in the portal or integrate scripts into their existing workflows for repeatability and scale. The experience is seamless—every recommendation is actionable, verifiable, and aligned with enterprise policy.
By midweek, the practitioner has implemented multiple optimizations without leaving the console or writing custom code. Each action is logged for audit visibility, ensuring compliance and transparency across the organization. What used to take hours of manual investigation and coordination now happens in minutes, freeing the team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than firefighting cost overruns.
Why It Matters
These aren’t just features—they’re answers to the pain points customers have been voicing for years.
- Cost visibility and predictability: Azure Copilot centralizes insights across subscriptions, helping teams avoid surprise bills and understand where every dollar goes.
- Resource inefficiencies: The optimization agent proactively identifies underutilized resources and guide teams to act before costs escalate.
- Scalability and complexity: Azure Copilot’s unified experience simplifies operations for even the most complex setups.
Azure Copilot isn’t just simplifying cloud operations—it’s transforming how teams collaborate, govern, and optimize.
Get Started at Ignite
At Ignite 2025, you’ll get hands-on with Azure Copilot’s optimization capabilities. Explore how intelligent assistance can help you:
- Reduce cloud costs
- Improve sustainability metrics
- Strengthen governance and compliance
- Drive better outcomes—faster
Azure Copilot: turning cloud operations into intelligent collaboration. Sign up for the Agents in Azure Copilot Limited (Preview) and try the experience today.
Microsoft