Ignite 2025 made one thing crystal clear: the enterprise is moving from chatbots to agentic AI - with end-to-end tooling for building, governing, and securing agents across Microsoft Cloud and Microsoft 365. Below are five announcements we think matter most to IT, security, and data leaders.
1) Microsoft Agent 365 - the control plane for Enterprise AI Agents
Microsoft introduced Agent 365, a centralized way to register, secure, and govern agents with identity, access controls, and observability built into the Microsoft 365 admin center. It's designed to prevent "shadow AI' by giving every agent a managed Entra ID identity and extending Defender/Purview protections to non-human actors.
2) Work IQ + Microsoft 365 Copilot agents in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
Work IQ becomes the contextual intelligence layer for Copilot—understanding how your teams work across emails, files, meetings, and chats—and now powers new Office agents and Agent Mode to co‑create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations directly from chat.
3) Fabric IQ & Foundry IQ - the unified knowledge stack for agents
Microsoft unveiled a full-stack approach to AI data context: Fabric IQ unifies analytical/operational data under a shared business model, while Foundry IQ provides a managed knowledge later across Microsoft 365, Fabric, your apps, and the web. The new Agent Factory program ties it together with a single metered and hands-on enablement.
4) Windows 365 for Agents - secure cloud PCs optimized for agent workloads
A new flavor of Windows 365 provides hardened, policy-controlled environments for running agentic AI ("computer use" agents) with an enterprise-grade security and governance - ideal for regulated industries and zero-trust architectures.
5) Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL - scale-out data for real-time AI
HorizonDB joins Microsoft's PostgreSQL family as a high-performance, scale-out option built for modern AI/data workloads - supporting the low-latency, high through-put scenarios today's agents and analytics demand.
Why this matters
Microsoft estimates organizations may operate ~1.3B AI agents by 2028—Agent 365, IQ layers, and hardened cloud PCs are the guardrails and fuel to scale responsibly.
Dive Deeper
Explore the full Microsoft Ignite 2025 Book of News for all announcements and on-demand sessions:
👉 news.microsoft.com/ignite-2025-book-of-news
How Datalink Networks can help
We partner with IT and security teams to operationalize Copilot and agentic AI - from readiness and governance to data architecture and secure deployment. If you'd like a tailored roadmap (security, identity, data, and adoption), reach out to us to schedule a 30-minute consultation.
