Microsoft Ignite 2025: Copilot and agents built to power the Frontier Firm

The future of work will be shaped by Frontier Firms—organizations that are human-led and agent-operated. These companies are reshaping how work gets done, empowering every employee with an AI assistant, amplifying impact with human-agent teamwork, and reinventing business processes with agents. Today at Microsoft Ignite, we introduced new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help every customer become Frontier.

Key announcements include:

• Work IQ—the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot to know you, your job, and your company inside and out.
• Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in chat—alongside Agent Mode in the Office apps—enable you to work iteratively with Copilot to deliver high-quality Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
• Agent 365—the control plane for agents—enables you to manage and secure agents with confidence.

We’re also excited to announce the Frontier Firm AI Initiative with the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard (D^3). The initiative aims to research human-AI collaboration and equip global C-suite leaders with the skills to transform their organizations into Frontier Firms. Barclays, BNY, Cigna Healthcare, Clifford Chance, DuPont, Eaton, Eli Lilly and Company, EY, GHD, Mastercard, Levi Strauss, Lumen, Mastercard, and Nestlé are among the inaugural cohort.

Microsoft 365 Copilot with Work IQ: AI built for work

We’re making Copilot a product you’ll love and won’t want to work without. Already, more than 90% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft 365 Copilot. We’re innovating at a rapid pace, shipping more than 400 new features in the last year, and bringing the latest models to Copilot, tuned for work and tailored to your business needs—from GPT-5 to computer use (CUA), to Sora 2. And, we’re expanding model choice with the addition of Anthropic models to ensure the right model for the job.

Work IQ is the intelligence layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents that helps Copilot understand you, your job, and your company. First, it’s your work data—all the rich knowledge in your emails, files, meetings, and chats—codifying how work gets done. Second, memory—your style, preferences, habits, and workflows—the work patterns and relationships unique to you. It not only understands your org chart—it understands your work chart. Third, inference combines data and memory to make valuable connections, unlock insights, and predict the next best action—going far beyond what connectors can do. For example, Copilot suggests the right agent for the task based on your prompt and intent. It’s an AI-powered feedback loop: Work IQ is woven into the apps you use every day, like Word, Outlook, and Teams, so Copilot is always learning—and using that signal to deliver ever-more tailored and personalized experiences.

With Work IQ for custom agents, you can now tap into this intelligence layer to build agents tuned for your unique workflows and business needs. This enables secure agent grounding that respects existing permissions, sensitivity labels, compliance controls, audit, logging, monitoring, and policy enforcement, and is available within Copilot Studio or via API for use in pro-code agent development. You can use Work IQ for custom agents with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license or on consumption billing. Copilot and agents—powered by Work IQ—put all your company knowledge to work for you and your business.

Updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot include:

Last month we brought vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in the Office apps. Now you can create world-class Office artifacts whether you start in Copilot chat or in the apps. With Agent Mode in Excel, users can now choose between Anthropic and OpenAI reasoning models. Agent Mode in Word is now generally available, and Agent Mode in PowerPoint is now available via the Frontier program. And new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents allow you to create high-quality documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Copilot chat. Available via the Frontier program.

Now you can talk to Copilot like a colleague with voice in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. From your phone, ask Copilot, “what are my top priorities for the day” or “catch me up on the meeting I missed” (generally available in December). Copilot in Outlook makes it easy to triage your inbox and calendar on the go using just your voice (in public preview). You can also quickly read and reply to emails with new one-tap prompts like “summarize and reply,” and schedule meetings—all from your phone (generally available).

Copilot Chat is your secure AI chat for work, available to every Microsoft 365 subscriber at no additional cost. And soon, it will include access to Agent Mode in chat and the Office apps and Copilot in Outlook will understand your inbox and calendar. Coming in Preview in early 2026.

Sora 2 brings next-generation AI video creation to work. Using Create, now you can make, edit, and share short-form videos for marketing or social content. Available via the Frontier Program.

Edge for Business is already trusted by top customers for the majority of their browsing minutes, and with Copilot Mode enabled, it becomes the world’s first secure enterprise AI browser. Multi-step workflows are enabled with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license—with multi-tab reasoning coming soon via the Frontier program.

We’re making human-agent teamwork a reality. Teams Mode for Microsoft 365 Copilot turns your 1:1 Copilot chats into group chats in Teams (in public preview). We also introduced collaboration-focused agents for Copilot—giving every team, project, and meeting an AI teammate. Facilitator agent in Teams drives the agenda, takes notes, keeps meetings on track, and even helps manage actions from the meeting (generally available). Now, agents in Teams Channels can work with third-party apps and agents via Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, such as GitHub, Asana, and Atlassian (Jira). For example, a user can ask the agent in a Teams channel about blockers and mitigation plans for an upcoming product launch, and the agent will pull risks directly from Jira, then schedule a meeting with the team (in public preview).

Copilot and agents transform every business process

We want to help every customer transform business process with agents, and Copilot is your window into agents in the flow of work—from Researcher, to custom agents, to third-party agents.

Sales Development Agent helps scale your sales team’s capacity—working autonomously on your behalf to help build pipeline, nurture leads, and personalize outreach, so sellers can focus on closing deals. It connects to sales data in CRM tools like Salesforce and Dynamics 365 and can take action right in the flow of work in the Microsoft 365 apps. Available via the Frontier Program in December 2025.

Last month, we introduced new ways to easily build apps, workflows, and agents using natural language. App Builder makes it easy to create and deploy apps in minutes, and Workflows agent helps automate tasks on a schedule or in response to events (available via the Frontier program).

We continue to make a broad range of OpenAI and Anthropic models available in Microsoft Copilot Studio to build agents using the right model for the task. And just last week we added OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5.1 (model availability varies by model).

Microsoft Agent Factory helps organizations build agents using Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio and deploy them anywhere, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, with a single metered plan—no upfront licensing and provisioning required. Eligible organizations can also tap into hands-on support from top AI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and access tailored role-based training to boost AI fluency across teams. Generally available.

Workforce Insights agent gives leaders and managers comprehensive, real-time insights into their team and organization across roles, tenure, and location to help leaders make data-driven workforce decisions. This is part of a new set of agents designed to enhance employee experiences by fostering connections and accelerating skill development. Available via the Frontier Program.

Agent 365: The control plane for agents

Agents are already changing how people work, and IDC predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028.¹ Agent 365 is the control plane for agents, extending the infrastructure you trust to manage your people to agents.

Whether your agents are created using Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, open-source frameworks, or from a growing ecosystem of partners, including Adobe, Manus, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, and more—Agent 365 helps you deploy, organize, and govern them securely. Agent 365 includes five key capabilities:

• A registry to give you a single source of truth for all the agents in your organization.
• Access control to manage agents and limit their access to only the resources required to perform specific tasks.
• Visualization—a unified dashboard and advanced analytics to see connections between agents, people, and data, and monitor agent behavior and performance in real time.
• Interoperability to equip agents with apps and data to simplify human-agent workflows.
• Security to help protect agents from threats and vulnerabilities and detect, investigate, and remediate attacks that target agents.

Agent 365 unites intelligence, security, and governance to unleash powerful agentic capabilities with the security you rely on from Microsoft. Available via the Frontier program.

Windows: Designed for the era of AI

Ask Copilot on the taskbar is your entry point to Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents, and search—accessible instantly by voice or text. Now, you can use the Windows taskbar to find apps, files, and settings and launch, invoke, monitor, and manage agents like Researcher—with even more first-and third-party agents coming soon. In public preview.

Windows 365 for Agents empowers makers to create and deploy enterprise-grade agents on secure, policy-controlled Cloud PCs streamed from the Microsoft Cloud. It powers first party advanced AI initiatives like Copilot Studio in a full Windows environment, and Microsoft Researcher in a Linux environment. We are excited to see how leading agent builders—including Manus, Fellou, GenSpark, Simular, and Tinyfish—are already looking forward to leveraging Windows 365 for Agents to deliver next-generation AI solutions. Manus, for example, is using Windows 365 to deliver secure, scalable, and always-available compute for its general AI agent, empowering users to access intelligent assistance wherever they work. With Windows 365 for Agents, organizations can accelerate AI adoption and scale workloads with the compliance protections you’d expect from Microsoft. In public preview.

Other news

We’re empowering every security professional with 12 new agents built into the flow of work across Microsoft Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview. To make it easier than ever to harness the power of these agents, Microsoft Security Copilot will be included for all Microsoft 365 E5 customers. These changes begin rolling out today for Security Copilot customers with Microsoft 365 E5 and will continue rolling out to all Microsoft 365 E5 licensed customers in the coming months. Learn more here.

We’re committed to helping every organization harness the power of AI to grow and scale their business. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is a new offer to bring every small and medium-sized business AI built for work. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is available for businesses with fewer than 300 users for $21 per user per month, starting in December.*

Get started today

We’re innovating with Copilot and agents to help every customer become a Frontier Firm. Visit Microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 app on your mobile device. For the latest research and insights on AI at work, visit WorkLab.

¹IDC Info Snapshot, sponsored by Microsoft, 1.3 Billion AI Agents by 2028, May 2025 #US53361825

*Pricing accurate as of November 2025.