Microsoft has officially launched Agent 365, an end-to-end observability and governance platform designed to help organisations manage, monitor, and secure AI agents at scale. The rollout is being supported globally by a select group of consulting and technology firms appointed as Strategic Partners.
The Strategic Partners are Cyclotron, Insight, Protiviti, LTM, PwC, Invoke, Accenture, SHI, Bechtle, Campana Schott, Tata Consultancy Services, Sulava, Kizan, Cognizant, Slalom, Reply, EY, Avanade, Capgemini, NTT Data, Hitachi, and Atea.
These firms have been selected as Microsoft’s official partners for helping organisations implement and scale Agent 365 across their operations. “We’re collaborating with our Strategic Partners to create targeted services to help customers onboard, tackle governance challenges and realise Agent 365’s full value,” Microsoft stated in its announcement.
The rise of agentic AI
Agent 365 is expected to play a central role in Microsoft’s broader strategy to accelerate enterprise adoption of agentic AI. Unlike traditional AI tools that respond to prompts, agentic AI systems are designed to act autonomously – making decisions, executing workflows, interacting with systems, and collaborating with other agents with minimal human intervention.
The market for agentic AI is expanding rapidly as organisations look to automate increasingly complex processes across functions such as customer service, cybersecurity, finance, operations, and software development. However, the rapid proliferation of AI agents is also introducing significant governance, security, and compliance challenges.
As the number of autonomous agents grows, organisations are under increasing pressure to maintain visibility and control over how these systems operate. AI agents can quickly spread across departments and business units, often operating beyond the direct oversight of the teams responsible for risk management and governance.
When agents are able to invoke tools, access sensitive enterprise data, and communicate with other agents, even seemingly routine workflows can create risks related to data oversharing, unauthorised actions, or misuse of systems and permissions. At the same time, as low-code and no-code AI development tools make agents easier to build and deploy, enterprise attack surfaces continue to expand.
Microsoft says Agent 365 is designed to address these concerns by giving organisations centralised observability into agent behaviour, activity, permissions, and interactions. The platform is intended to help enterprises monitor AI systems in real time, enforce governance controls, detect anomalies, and maintain compliance as agentic AI deployments scale across the business.
“The introduction of Microsoft Agent 365 marks an important step in the evolution of enterprise AI,” commented Filippo Rizzante, CTO of Reply. “As organisations move towards distributed networks of intelligent agents, governance, observability and lifecycle management become critical enablers of scale.”
Yuji Shono, Head of the Global AI Office at NTT Data, added: “With Agent 365, organisations can scale and govern AI agents with confidence, while maintaining enterprise grade security and control. Agent 365 enables organizations to move beyond experimentation, driving tangible business value and innovation through trusted AI adoption.”
The consulting firms appointed as Strategic Partners will supports organisations with advisory services, agentic AI landscape design, and the implementation of Agent 365 within their infrastructure. All companies that made the official partners list are award-winning Microsoft partners.
Source link
#Microsoft #names #select #group #consultancies #Strategic #Partners #Agent
