Microsoft’s leadership emphasizes that executives are already operating multiple autonomous agents, highlighting shadow AI's pervasiveness and the urgent need for governance to prevent uncontrolled usage.

Microsoft has released Agent 365, a unified control plane to observe, govern, and secure AI agents across cloud platforms, endpoints, and SaaS ecosystems, signaling that autonomous AI governance is now an urgent enterprise concern.

Starting in June, Defender will map blast radius by building an asset graph that ties devices, MCP servers, identities, and cloud resources to each agent, enabling better risk assessment and faster incident response.

Agent 365 centralizes registry and policy management for three agent types—user-delegated, autonomous behind-the-scenes, and team-workflow—priced at $15 per user per month, with coverage for standalone use and Microsoft 365 E7 integration.

The strategy frames agents as the new class of enterprise apps, with a phased adoption path beginning with inventory and identity management, followed by access controls, isolation, and deeper visibility; an IT/security AMA is planned for May 12 to discuss specifics.

Agent 365 extends governance to multi-cloud environments by enabling registry synchronization with AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud (Gemini Enterprise/Vertex AI) for cross-cloud discovery and basic lifecycle actions, aiming for consistent controls across clouds.

A new capability will discover and manage local AI agents on employee devices (shadow AI), starting with OpenClaw, to uncover unauthorized agents and apply policy controls via Defender and Intune, with plans to support 18 agent types by June 2026.

Windows 365 for Agents enters public preview, offering a sandboxed Cloud PC environment for agent workloads governed by Intune and Entra to isolate high-risk AI tasks and enable safer enterprise deployment.

Microsoft has built a broad partner network for Agent 365, enabling partner agents from Zendesk, Egnyte, Genspark, Kasisto, Kore.ai, and n8n to be managed through Agent 365 with varying SDK integration and identity-based onboarding.