On May 1, 2026, Microsoft moved Agent 365 — its management plane for AI agents — from preview to general availability. It is sold standalone at $15 per user per month or bundled inside Microsoft 365 E7. Each license covers anyone who manages, sponsors, or uses agents inside an organization.
Agent 365 is Microsoft's bet that the IT problem in 2026 isn't building agents — it's governing them. The platform discovers shadow AI on employee machines (OpenClaw, GitHub Copilot CLI, Claude Code), applies Microsoft Defender and Intune controls, and tracks which devices, identities, and cloud resources each agent can reach. The general-availability release adds Windows 365 for Agents — Cloud PCs purpose-built to run agent workloads in policy-controlled environments — and a registry-sync that pulls AWS Bedrock and Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform agents into the same inventory.
This extends the Microsoft 365 enterprise lock-in into the agent era. By pricing it inside the M365 E7 frontier suite launched in April, and partnering with Adobe, SAP, Zendesk, Manus, Genspark, and n8n to make their agents fully manageable through Agent 365, Microsoft is positioning itself as the default control plane regardless of which model or framework a customer uses. AWS and Google now either match the governance layer or accept that their agents pass through Microsoft's registry on the way to enterprise buyers.
Takeaway for learners — if you're building AI agents and want enterprises to actually deploy them, the IT buyer asks three questions: who can run this, what data can it see, and how do I turn it off. Agent 365 standardizes those questions across vendors. Knowing what an agent registry, an identity-bound agent, and a policy-controlled agent Cloud PC mean is now table-stakes vocabulary for anyone selling AI into a Microsoft shop.