The word “agent” might remind us of a human who plans travel or maybe a well-dressed British spy. But in the rapidly evolving world of AI, the term has a whole new meaning that is reshaping our interaction with technology and automation.
As the technology continues to advance, new Microsoft AI agents unveiled over the past few weeks can help people every day with things like research, cybersecurity and more.
First things first: What is an AI agent?
Imagine having a personal assistant that doesn’t just respond to commands but anticipates your needs, does complex tasks and keeps learning from every interaction — meaning it actually improves over time.
AI agents analyze their environment, make decisions and take actions, tackling tasks with you or on your behalf based on your goals and guardrails. That means that instead of doing repetitive tasks, you can save time and focus on more creative and strategic work.
Agents that use reasoning to help you do more
Two new reasoning agents announced in late March for Microsoft 365 Copilot can help you be more productive in the office. Named Researcher and Analyst, both can securely analyze your work data — emails, meetings, files, chats and more — and the web to deliver highly skilled expertise on demand.
Researcher helps you tackle complex, multi-step research at work. It can build a detailed marketing strategy based on your work data and broader info from the web, identify opportunities for a new product based on emerging trends and internal data, or create a comprehensive quarterly report for a client review. It can also integrate data from external sources such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Confluence directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Researcher combines OpenAI’s deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities.
Analyst, built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model, thinks like a virtual data scientist. It can take raw data scattered across multiple spreadsheets to do things like forecast how much demand there will be for a new product or build a visualization of customer purchasing patterns.
Agents that help automate cybersecurity tasks
Other new agents can help organizations defend against cyberthreats, handling certain security tasks to help human teams be more efficient.
These agents, introduced March 24, are designed to autonomously assist with critical areas such as phishing, data security and identity management.
For example, a new phishing triage agent in Microsoft Security Copilot can handle routine phishing alerts and cyberattacks, freeing up human cybersecurity teams to focus on more complex cyberthreats and proactive security measures.
And the new Alert Triage Agents in Microsoft Purview can triage data loss prevention and insider risk alerts, prioritize critical incidents and continuously improve accuracy based on administrator feedback.
Agents to help developers build and deploy AI securely
Agents are giving developers new options as well.
Two new ones are accessible in Azure AI Foundry — a platform where developers and organizations build, deploy and manage AI apps, providing the infrastructure developers need to create intelligent agents on a large scale.
Microsoft Fabric data agents allow developers using Azure AI Agent Service in Azure AI Foundry to connect customized, conversational agents created in Microsoft Fabric. These data agents can reason over and unlock insights from various sources to make better data-driven decisions.
For example, NTT DATA, a Japanese IT and consulting company, is using data agents in Microsoft Fabric to have conversations with HR and back-office operations data to better understand what is happening in the organization.
And the new AI Red Teaming Agent, now in public preview, systematically probes AI models to uncover safety risks. It generates comprehensive reports and tracks improvements over time, creating an AI safety-testing ecosystem that evolves alongside your system.
Learn more about the latest in agents at Microsoft Build 2025 — registration is now open.
Image was created using Microsoft Designer, an AI-powered graphic design application.