From Agent 365 to Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and major upgrades to Copilot Studio, the keynote underscored Microsoft’s commitment to building an AI ecosystem where context, memory, and reasoning power work seamlessly across applications, business systems, and devices.

Speaking during the keynote, Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, described the moment as “a defining pivot point for the global enterprise,” adding that businesses that successfully integrate AI at every level will form a new category of high-performing organizations.

“We’re entering the age of the Frontier Firm, companies that use AI not as an add-on, but as a foundational operating system,” Althoff said.

“These organizations will outperform by orders of magnitude because their people, data, workflows, and AI agents work together as one intelligent unit.”

Agent 365: The Command Center for Enterprise AI Agents

A major highlight of the keynote was the introduction of Agent 365, a centralized control plane for managing, securing, monitoring, and governing AI agents across an organization.

The platform allows businesses to oversee Microsoft-built agents, in-house custom agents, and third-party or open-source agents – giving IT teams a complete security and management dashboard.

Agent 365 integrates tightly with Microsoft Defender, Entra, Purview, and the Foundry control plane, ensuring that enterprise-scale AI adoption remains secure and policy-driven.

Althoff emphasized that governance and accountability will remain central as organizations scale AI:

“Autonomous agents are powerful, but they must be observable, secure, and grounded in business logic,” he noted.

“Agent 365 ensures enterprises can innovate boldly without compromising safety or trust.”

Unified “IQ” Layers: Context That Makes AI Truly Intelligent

Microsoft also announced the expansion of its new intelligence frameworks:

• Work IQ — Gives agents rich context from Microsoft 365 data (emails, chats, meetings, documents).
• Fabric IQ — A semantic data layer that unifies business data, both structured and unstructured.
• Foundry IQ — A next-generation retrieval and reasoning engine enabling multi-step autonomous planning.

These three layers form a universal context system that lets AI agents reason more deeply and act more intelligently.

“Context is everything,” Althoff said during the presentation.

“The agents of tomorrow don’t just answer questions, they understand your business, anticipate needs, and drive outcomes.”

Copilot Studio Evolves into a Natural Language Agent Builder

Microsoft showcased a significantly upgraded Copilot Studio, designed to let users build workflows, automate tasks, and develop custom AI agents through natural language commands.

Users can now generate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint reports simply by describing them. Copilot Studio also ships with a new “workflows agent” that converts ideas into executable processes instantly.

Agentic AI Spreads Across Microsoft 365 Apps and Teams

New agent capabilities were demonstrated across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Teams. In Teams, agents can collaborate with one another in channels and connect to third-party apps via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

A Teams channel agent can now pull data from GitHub, Jira, Asana, or HR systems, highlight risks, propose plans, or automatically schedule action items.

What This Means for Enterprises

Ignite 2025 marks a shift from AI as a set of features to AI as an operational layer that touches every part of the digital enterprise.

Thanks to powerful security controls, a unified data model, and deep application integrations, Microsoft says enterprises can now build scalable AI ecosystems with confidence.

Althoff closed his keynote with a call to action:

“Every organization now has a choice: be disrupted by AI or become a Frontier Firm leading the disruption. The tools are here. The moment is now.”

Sophos, a global leader in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, today launched Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) for Microsoft Defender, a fully-managed offering that provides the industry’s most robust threat response capabilities for organizations using Microsoft Security.

Sophos MDR for Microsoft Defender adds a critical layer of 24/7 protection across the Microsoft Security suite of endpoint, SIEM, identity, cloud, and other solutions to safeguard against data breaches, ransomware and other active adversary cyberattacks.

“Baseline security technology alone is not enough to defeat determined attackers who will find a way in, as evidenced by the cases our incident response team manages. Attackers are extremely persistent, and organizations need a human layer of security to conduct threat hunts, identify attacker behaviors attempting to evade security tools, and respond to stop attacks with speed and precision,”

said Raja Patel, senior vice president of products and managed services at Sophos.

“Rather than forcing them to rip and replace existing technologies, we support organizations with what they need, how and where they need it – regardless of what security solutions they already use. For channel partners delivering Microsoft Security offerings, there’s tremendous opportunity to ensure customers are fully protected and maximizing value from their existing deployments.”

Sophos MDR for Microsoft Defender integrates telemetry from a broad range of Microsoft Security tools. Unlike other MDR offerings that limit support to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint or Microsoft Sentinel and provide minimal threat response capabilities, Sophos MDR fortifies the broader Microsoft Security suite, including:

• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
• Microsoft Defender for Identity
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
• Identity Protection (Azure Active Directory)
• Office 365 Security and Compliance Center
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Office 365 Management Activity

Telemetry from these sources is automatically consolidated, correlated and prioritized with insights from the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem and the Sophos X-Ops threat intelligence unit of more than 500 security analysts, threat hunters, responders, data scientists, and other specialists across Sophos worldwide.

This enables the Sophos MDR operations team to identify and stop more threats than Microsoft Security tools – or any security technology – can on their own.

“Sixty-five percent of organizations have had a significant ransomware event in the last 12 months despite significant investments in cybersecurity tools, according to IDC research. It is often not a tool but a people problem. Most IT and security teams are generally overworked, understaffed and under resourced. They cannot triage and address the daily deluge of alerts and issues to get the desired protections promised from their current tool investments,”

said Frank Dickson, group vice president for IDC’s Security and Trust research practice.

“For organizations leveraging the Microsoft security stack, Sophos MDR assists those to realize the outcomes hoped for from their existing cybersecurity investments.”

“Our guiding principle is to deliver the best security outcomes possible for our customers. Advancements in technologies like extended detection and response (XDR) and generative AI are driving efficiencies in security operations, but the human element remains a critical component to stopping advanced threats,”

said Kieron Newsham, chief technologist – cyber security at Softcat.

“We’re really pleased with how Sophos MDR is helping our customers overcome the increasing talent shortage and widening skills gap to deliver the best cybersecurity outcomes possible, independent of the customer’s size, structure or previous technology investments.”

Sophos MDR is the most widely used MDR offering with more than 17,000 customers of all sizes and across all industries, and is the top-rated and most reviewed MDR solution on Gartner Peer Insights and G2. It is the only MDR service that can be delivered across end users’ existing third-party security deployments as well as Sophos offerings.

In addition to Microsoft, organizations can also integrate telemetry sources from dozens of other vendors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Check Point, Okta, Darktrace, and many others, through the Sophos Marketplace.

Availability

Sophos MDR for Microsoft Defender is available now to all Sophos MDR Essentials customers using security technologies included in Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 licenses.

The customizable offering with different threat response options is available through Sophos’ global channel of reseller partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs).