At the Microsoft Ignite 2025 event, several major announcements were made, illustrating the rapid evolution ofgenerative AI within Microsoft products and services. This edition focused on autonomous agents and the deep integration of Copilot at all levels of the enterprise, from the desktop to the cloud. Here’s a look at the new features that made the biggest impression on me, including the new features in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Agents 365: central control for AI agents
Microsoft Agent 365 is introduced as a control tool for deploying, organizing and governing AI agents within your organization. In concrete terms, Microsoft Agent 365 extends Microsoft 365 administration tools to autonomous agents: it provides a centralized registry of all agents in the enterprise, manages each agent’s access rights to the necessary resources, offers visualizations to monitor agent activity and performance in real time, ensures their security (verified identity, threat detection) and facilitates their interoperability with existing applications. Microsoft Agent 365 integrates with trusted solutions (Microsoft Entra ID, Defender, Purview…) to apply security and compliance to these new agents. Available now via the Frontier program in the Microsoft 365 Administration Center, Agent 365 marks a key step in adopting AI responsibly and at scale in the enterprise. For early access, visit the resources section of this article.
Copilot and new AI capabilities in Microsoft 365
Microsoft continues to enhance Microsoft 365 Copilot, making it even more indispensable for everyday use. From now on, Copilot will come withdedicated agents for Word, Excel and PowerPoint – available in pre-release via the Frontier program – which will enable you to create high-quality documents, spreadsheets or presentations directly from simple natural language queries in Copilot chat. At the same time, Agent Mode in Office applications is becoming generally available in Word, and will soon arrive in Excel and PowerPoint, offering interactive co-creation directly within these applications.
Another interesting new feature is the ability tointeract with Copilot by voice. In Outlook Mobile, for example, Copilot can now be controlled by voice to summarize e-mails, suggest answers or schedule meetings without touching the keyboard. This voice interaction, in public pre-release, aims to make AI even more accessible in mobile situations. In addition, Copilot Chat (the secure AI chat available to all Microsoft 365 subscribers) continues to evolve: it will soon support Agent mode and understand the context of your mailbox and calendar, to offer ever more personalized responses (expected in early 2026).
Work IQ, Fabric IQ and Foundy IQ: unified contextual intelligence
Microsoft has presented a major breakthrough in AI contextualization with a universal intelligence layer combining Work IQ, Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ. Work IQ is the “brain” of Microsoft 365 Copilot: it aggregates your work data (e-mails, files, meetings, chats, etc.), models your organizational memory (preferences, habits, workflows) and draws inferences from it so that Copilot understands your role, your style and the overall work context. In concrete terms, Work IQ enables AI to link information and anticipate relevant actions, while respecting corporate permissions and policies.
At Ignite 2025, Microsoft announced that it is extending this principle across the entire organization with Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ. Fabric IQ (currently in pre-release) unifies enterprise data under a common semantic model – based on Microsoft Fabric – providing a connected view of the enterprise and enabling both teams and AI agents to reason on unified business data. For its part, Foundry IQ (also available in pre-release) represents the next generation of RAG (retrieval augmented generation): it is a knowledge system capable of feeding agents with consolidated information from a multitude of data sources (Azure services, SharePoint, Fabric, web…). Foundry IQ automates multi-source search and synthesis to provide agents with rich context, while respecting data security and governance. In short, the alliance of Work IQ, Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ will provide AI agents with a comprehensive understanding of what the user is doing, what enterprise data means, and how to access it to make smarter decisions.
What’s new in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is evolving into an AI-driven work platform. One of the flagship announcements is Teams Mode for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which turns an individual Copilot chat into a group collaboration session in Teams. In practice, you can invite colleagues into your Copilot conversation to brainstorm and co-write with AI, while retaining control over what is and isn’t shared from your initial prompts. This feature, in public pre-release, enables a team to work together with Copilot to develop ideas, plans or documents, reinforcing the collaborative dimension of AI. If you’d like to familiarize yourself with this new feature, a guided step-by-step demonstration is available via the button below.
What’s more, the Copilot experience in Teams is now unified across chats, channels and meetings. For users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, this means that AI can analyze conversation history and meeting transcripts to automatically generate intelligent summaries, extract decisions made and highlight important action items. No more information delays: Copilot helps you to catch up with the thread of exchanges much more quickly by synthesizing the essentials.
Teams also welcomes new autonomous agents designed to improve group productivity.
- The Channel Agent, now in public pre-release, acts as a virtual expert within a Teams channel: it can summarize the progress of a project via status reports and even automatically generate a Workback Plan listing the tasks to be carried out with their deadlines, so that nothing is forgotten in the management of a project.
- The Facilitator agent in meetings helps structure the session by detecting the agenda, tracking the progress of points discussed and drafting minutes in real time. This intelligent facilitator, now generally available, eases the burden on organizers by ensuring that meetings run smoothly and that actions are followed up.
Finally, Teams introduces enhancements for broader, more secure collaboration. It is now possible to chat on Teams with external users via their e-mail address, even if they don’t have Teams on their side. These B2B or B2C conversations are protected by new trust indicators that clearly identify external participants (“verified e-mail”), reinforcing vigilance and security when exchanging with guests. The 3D immersive event experience in Teams has been upgraded to general availability, enabling avatar participants to meet in personalized virtual environments (now compatible with Meta Quest headsets). The Teams application is also enhanced with practical features such as multiple window opening (for chat, calendar, etc., improving multitasking) and customizable meeting report templates to adapt auto-generated notes to your audience (for example, to create an executive summary).
On the Teams Rooms side, Microsoft is preparing for the future by aligning these devices with Windows 11. It has been confirmed that support for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows 10 ends in October 2025, which means that room systems must migrate to Windows 11 to continue receiving security and feature updates. Organizations are encouraged to check the compatibility of their current equipment with Windows 11 and plan to replace models that are too old. This transition will guarantee meeting rooms that are more efficient, secure and fully compatible with future Teams innovations.
Also of note: Microsoft recently announced new end-of-support dates for Teams Rooms running Android. Android 12 devices will be supported until 2025-09-30, Android 13 devices until 2026-09-30, Android 14 devices until 2027-09-30, and Android 15 devices until 2028-09-30. It is therefore recommended that organizations plan their fleet upgrades now, to ensure the security and continued compatibility of their Teams meeting rooms.
Azure Local: the hybrid cloud
When it comes to hybrid cloud infrastructure, Azure Local was highlighted during Ignite. Azure Local is the solution that enables Azure services to be deployed in distributed locations (at the customer site, at the edge, in local data centers), all managed in a unified way via Azure Arc. In other words, Azure Local brings the power of the Azure cloud to the customer, offering the flexibility to run cloud applications and workloads on their own infrastructure, while retaining centralized visibility and control from the Azure portal. This approach meets sovereignty and compliance needs: for example, a hospital can process sensitive patient data locally with Azure governance, or a government agency keep its critical workloads in a controlled environment while benefiting from cloud tools.
Azure Local, previewed last year, is now coming of age with notable new capabilities. Microsoft has announced support for large-scale deployments: Azure Local can now scale up to 100+ nodes across multiple racks, enabling over 10,000 compute cores on a single cluster in pre-release. In addition, the Microsoft 365 Local service is launched in general availability to run on Azure Local. It becomes possible to host local instances of Exchange, SharePoint or Skype Enterprise on its Azure Local infrastructure – a key solution for organizations requiring 100% private cloud productivity tools. Azure Local also offers greater storage flexibility, with pre-release integration of external SAN arrays from leading suppliers (Pure Storage, NetApp, Dell, etc.) to reuse existing infrastructures and ensure high performance. In addition, the Azure Migrate tool for Azure Local is now available: it enables VMware virtual machines to be easily migrated to Azure Local in an agentless way, simplifying the modernization of legacy fleets to this new model.
These enhancements position Azure Local as a robust foundation for hybrid and sovereign clouds. Businesses can choose from a vast catalog of validated hardware and deploy Azure Local in connected or disconnected environments, from the central datacenter to remote sites, while benefiting from the consistency of the Azure model for operations. In short, with Azure Local now in general availability, Microsoft offers organizations a solution for combining the best of cloud and local: the agility and scale of the public cloud, combined with control over on-premises data and infrastructure.
Agents in Dynamics 365 Contact Center
At Ignite 2025, attention was also focused on the customer experience with Dynamics 365 Customer Service / Contact Center. Microsoft had introduced 10 new autonomous agents to Dynamics 365 last year, and these generative AI-based agents are now at the heart of the Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Designed to assist advisors and deliver faster, more personalized customer interactions, they can handle multiple conversations simultaneously, switch between sessions without loss of context, and automate certain support tasks. Integrated directly into the Dynamics 365 agent interface, these assistants boost operational efficiency by handling routine requests or offering relevant advice in real time from the company’s knowledge base.
At one demonstration, a striking example was the TimeSheet Agent. This intelligent agent illustrates how automation can simplify timesheet management: it cross-references meetings and projects to propose pre-filled entries. Of course, the user retains ultimate control, since the agent does not submit the timesheet, but it makes the job much easier by preparing the data in advance. This approach is a concrete example of how digital assistance can transform an often tedious task into a smooth and efficient process.
From now on, a virtual agent can greet a customer on chat, understand their question thanks to AI, answer it or collect preliminary information, then pass the case on to a human operator with a full contextual summary. Other agents help the operator during the call, by suggesting the next best action or searching for solutions in internal documentation. This generation of intelligent agents, coupled with the power of Copilot within Dynamics 365, reinvents customer service processes: employees are augmented by AI to deliver smoother, more proactive experiences across all channels (voice, chat, email…), while reducing resolution time and repetitive effort. A demonstration at Ignite showed how these autonomous agents, working hand-in-hand with advisors, improve customer satisfaction while saving precious time for support teams.
🎯Conclusion
In conclusion, Microsoft Ignite 2025 illustrated Microsoft’s determination to enter squarely into theera of “Frontier Firms ” – those pioneering companies where humans collaborate closely with intelligent agents. From Copilot enhancements across the Microsoft 365 suite, to the introduction of Agent 365 to govern this new AI ecosystem, to the integration of agents into Teams and Dynamics 365, the announcements showed how AI is no longer confined to assistants, but is becoming a true digital teammate. The event also emphasized the importance of doing this responsibly and in a piloted way, through tools that guarantee security, compliance and large-scale management. No doubt, following these announcements, the coming year will see many organizations adopt these innovations to transform the way they work and interact with their customers.
For me, Ignite 2025 confirms a new way of working, where humans and AI agents collaborate hand in hand in hybrid mode.
🔗Sources
Want to find out more about the Ignite 2025 announcements? Find all the information in Microsoft’s official sources below:
