A seller needs to log a new opportunity. A manager wants to approve a request. A marketer has to update a campaign asset. Until today, these actions often meant taking insights from Microsoft 365 Copilot and switching tabs. Agents can now change that: helping people take action in their go-to work apps, without needing to leave chat in Copilot.
But enabling this kind of capability raises real questions for IT: What risks do these agents introduce? Are they actually being used? And are they behaving as expected?
The more agents you launch and the more powerful these agents are, the more these answers matter. That’s why we’re introducing three new capabilities across Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio that help people move work forward faster—while keeping IT firmly in control:
- Enhanced agents that bring apps directly into chat in Copilot
- New ways for employees to find the right agent, fast
- Tools to continuously evaluate agent quality over time
With these capabilities, employees can use their go-to business apps directly in Copilot and get a simpler way to discover the right agents for their tasks. Meanwhile, IT gains objective signals that help validate agent behavior as usage expands. Here's what you need to know.
Interacting with apps through chat in Copilot
Today, the gap between AI insight and in-app execution starts to close—without IT needing to relax standards or introduce new risk vectors.
When an employee prompts Copilot and calls an agent connected to an approved app, that agent can bring that app’s interactive experience directly into the conversation. From there, the employee stays in the driver's seat, using chat in Copilot to take real, in‑app actions such as:
- Scheduling a new event in Outlook
- Adding a new sales opportunity to Dynamics 365 Sales
- Creating or editing a flyer in Adobe Express
- Completing an approval form via Microsoft Power Apps
All of this happens without needing to leave Copilot. Employees interact with the app directly in chat or use follow-up prompts to carry out work in the app.
Get started quickly with pre-built app experiences
This month, we’re launching support for a focused set of early experiences, including:
- Microsoft apps, such as Outlook, Dynamics 365 Customer Service (public preview by early April), and Dynamics 365 Sales (public preview by early April)
- Custom line-of-business apps built with Power Apps (public preview this March)
Take Outlook, for example. You can now tell Copilot who you want to meet with, and it'll find time slots that work. Simply select one, and an agent will schedule that time together. This experience is currently generally available (GA). Similarly, you can ask Copilot to draft an email on your behalf, edit it, and hit send—without leaving the chat (currently in Frontier).
We will also introduce in-chat experiences for a handful of Microsoft partner apps, including Adobe Express, Adobe Acrobat, Base44, Box, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Miro, Monday.com, Optimizely, and Wix. All pre-built partner app experiences will be available via the Microsoft 365 Agent Store by mid-April.
“With the Figma app in Copilot, you can turn conversations into AI-generated FigJam diagrams to take ideas further,” says Brendan O'Driscoll, Figma’s VP of Product. “By connecting Figma with your favorite tools, it’s easier than ever to visualize, iterate, and collaborate with your entire team.”
Build the app experiences your team needs
You’re not limited to the apps we ship out of the box. Your team can build agents in Copilot that work with the mission-critical apps that your systems, processes, and workflows depend on.
Under the hood, two open extensibility standards make this possible: MCP Apps and the OpenAI Apps SDK. Both give development teams a structured way to connect the apps your organization relies on to agents in Copilot—so those apps can surface interactive experiences directly in chat. Agents built with either standard use familiar development patterns, so your team can build and iterate without requiring a steep learning curve.
MCP Apps and Apps SDK will roll out to GA on web and desktop later this month, with mobile following this spring. Share the Apps SDK and MCP Apps technical documentation with your development team to get started.
Get to know the IT controls
Even as agents become more powerful, we’ve designed this experience with governance in mind. Agents with interactive app experiences use the same governance and admin patterns you already trust for agents in Copilot, keeping IT control the top priority.
You decide which agents are available in your tenant, and who can use them—globally, per agent, or for specific departments. Each agent operates strictly within existing app permissions and identity boundaries, so you can enable richer experiences in Copilot without opening new, unmanaged entry points into your environment.
All agents can be monitored end‑to‑end using Agent 365—a unified control plane that gives IT a single place to see which agents are live, where they can act, and how they're being used. With it, you can control how agents are provisioned and scoped before rolling out this new experience broadly. Learn how to provision your organization's agents at scale.
Empowering employees to find the right agent fast
As agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot become more capable, employees need a reliable way to find the right agent for the task at hand. But when dozens of agents are available, employees shouldn't have to know which one to use when. Agent Recommendations (generally available) surfaces the right agent at the right moment, directly in the flow of work.
When users prompt Microsoft 365 Copilot, the system analyzes their intent and suggests an agent that’s already installed and approved by IT. No special syntax or prompt engineering required.
These recommendations are assistive, meaning employees can choose to start a new conversation with the suggested agent or continue in their current chat. All the while, discoverability only happens within known, governed boundaries —mitigating the introduction of new risks. This helps employees quickly find agents purpose-built for the scenario at hand, while IT maintains a consistent governance model as usage expands.
Holding agents to your organization's standards
As organizations rely on more agents for more impactful work, quality and reliability stop being nice‑to‑haves—they’re essential. Small changes to prompts, models, or data can introduce drift that can be hard to detect, especially as agent usage expands across teams and scenarios.
Agent Evaluations in Microsoft Copilot Studio (currently in public preview) gives you a structured way to answer the question: Is this agent actually doing what it's supposed to do?
Evals work by running agents against authentic questions and scenarios, then generating objective scores for accuracy and intent alignment—so quality isn't just assumed; it's measured. By comparing results over time, teams can help catch regressions earlier, validate improvements, and apply a consistent quality bar before agents reach broader use.
These signals reinforce that agents aren’t set‑and‑forget automation; they’re managed enterprise workloads. With objective evidence in hand, IT and makers can make informed rollout decisions and scale agent usage more confidently, knowing behavior is monitored, and reliability can be improved as usage grows.
Learn how to set up Agent Evals in Microsoft Copilot Studio, so you can assess agent quality and readiness before expanding usage.
Make agents more capable while staying in control
Support for apps in agents, Agent Recommendations, and Agent Evals are designed to work together as a system, helping organizations move faster—without compromising trust. By treating agents as first‑class, governed workloads, IT teams can enable more capable agents while maintaining the control their organizations expect.
To get started:
Microsoft