Meet Your New Virtual Colleague: Microsoft 365 Agents Are Almost Here

In an exciting announcement ahead of Microsoft Ignite in a couple of weeks, we now have more information about the future rollout of "virtual colleague" class AI agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams.

The pieces of this puzzle have been building for a while; including the drive to offer a full Entra ID identity for agents, essentially making them manageable alongside human users as part of Entra Agent ID.

However, now we have a timeline (arriving in targeted release mid-November), alongside the first teasing of a licensing model - a new A365 license that will need to be provisioned into order to turn a published "Agent template" into a working agentic user.

Given the timeline outlined, we can expect that these agentic users might be a big part of the Copilot updates we hear at Ignite. That would make sense - year 1 of this Copilot age, it was Microsoft 365 Copilot itself that was the focus, year 2 it was customized agents inside Copilot, and year 3 perhaps the focus will be more proactive and autonomous agents that work alongside Copilot users. In my mind, we are just getting to the really exciting part of this journey!

First posted on Linkedin on 11/06/2025 -> View Linkedin post here