Nothing drives Microsoft product development deadlines quite like big conferences. Be it Build for the developer audience, or Ignite for the rest of us, these are the moments when peak excitement must be reached. Even though physical events are no longer required to gather everyone around to hear the keynote, these live audiences still emphasize what a super exciting thing the vendor is here to talk about.

What happens after the event is over? That depends on how well the schedule of the product announcements happens to align with actual product development milestones. If we are talking about a real product that is sold, bought and used, that is. If the launch is merely about a murky initiative or a joint effort between tech CEOs up on the keynote stage, expect to see one marketing landing page and a few press releases shortly after. And then, nothing else will come out of it, like what happened to the Common Data Model (CDM).

Let’s focus on the here and now, though. What were some new product brands and feature names that came out of Ignite 2025? Well, I certainly was paying a lot of attention to the Microsoft Agent 365 announcement, as some of you may have noticed. I also saw people share the Work IQ term on social media a lot. Oh, and if we accept a service rebranding into this game, I guess Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) would be a worthy contender.

Those are the top three new search terms that came to my mind. What I wanted to check next was if anyone else was interested in them. More precisely: if there was any interest and activity on these brands/names after the Ignite week. So, I opened Google Trends and started exploring. To have a benchmark from outside the MS ecosystem, I picked a product that came to my mind first, which happened to be OpenCode — an open alternative to single-vendor AI coding solutions.

This is how these search terms performed, from a few weeks before Ignite 2025 all the way to this week:

Compared to the rest, Agent 365 sure had a peak. That’s hardly surprising, given how Microsoft’s own book of news and most high-level posts opened up with A365. Tech press would then join in to add it as a headline mention, leading to people searching for more information. Work IQ had some interest, but obviously it was more abstract. As for Foundry, I bet most people didn’t notice that it’s no longer under Azure branding.

What happened after the event is a bit surprising. I mean, it’s clear that there will be a drop in search interest as the next round of tech news and AI breakthroughs grabs the media’s attention. But wow: it seems like there’s been hardly any traction for Agent 365! All the energy was spent on exciting news in November and today it is not on the agenda of customers or partners on a meaningful scale.

Meanwhile, an “open-source, Go-based CLI application that brings AI assistance to your terminal” is gradually climbing to a level of daily Google search interest that rivals the marketing results from a trillion-dollar software giant. Yeah, OpenCode doesn’t have local sales teams in every country of the world who can reach out to prospective customers, like MS has. But still, it’s not exactly a great sign for the agent story from Redmond, now is it?

Microsoft has adopted the Frontier program as the vehicle for launching preview versions of what might have been alpha releases in the classic world of software and servers. In the age of Copilot, Frontier is the way how customers can explicitly acknowledge that they are willing to accept preview versions of things like Workflows (Frontier) or App Builder (Frontier) into their Microsoft 365 Copilot environments.

With Agent 365, Frontier was also the plan. Checking the visual assets folder launched as part of Ignite 2025 book of news, we see that right after the main character, there was the side-kick called Sales Development Agent that was said to be “now in Frontier preview”:

That was the plan in November 15, 2025. Two months later, on January 15, 2026 — nothing was available. Trust me, I’ve been looking for evidence of the Sales Development Agent all across the internet a few times. No one has seen it, and even my Gemini CLI was reflecting on how the silence around the agent is deafening:

Before Christmas, the documentation page for Agent 365: Use and collaborate was being updated with new expected shipping dates as the earlier ones slipped. Now, it’s been saying “The Sales Development agent will be available to all customers on or before December 19, 2025” for a month.

On January 16, when writing this email newsletter issue, the agent finally showed up in my tenant on the M365 Admin side. I was able to activate it there, but it’s apparently going to take time (more than 2h at least) for it to become visible in the Teams store (under this URL). So I’ll leave that topic for a different week to cover.

Why do I care about one specific agent so much? Simply because it would be the only way to experiment with my A365 trial license. Without having to build an entire custom agent template of my own. The Frontier trial licenses Microsoft gave everyone for using Agent 365 capabilities are set to expire in one month. There’s been no first-party functionality available to apply these on. The Sales Development Agent has been the only hope for someone to see the agentic 365 future in action.

At the end of the day: if there’s no license-gated features to use, is it even a Microsoft product? We see dashboards like the one for Agent 365 popping up everywhere across the MS cloud these days. While an “agent map” might look cool the first time you see it (check the 12s video below if you haven’t), are you gonna spend much time clicking around such a visualization after the demo is over? Or is it likely to become the next SharePoint spaces which promised to reimagine your intranet in 3D and (surprisingly) didn’t?

The positive thing about the lack of signals for anything related to the centerpiece of Ignite 2025 is that performing just simple web searches from the past X weeks can reveal some interesting comments from the community. Like this one Reddit thread where an anonymous Microsoft employee shares their sentiment about the experience:

The quotes used around “product” are quite telling. I have also begun to believe that A365 is more like CDM than any concrete product with a set of specific features designed for a real customer of the product in mind. As we’ve seen, you don’t need to have a product to do a big keynote launch. A “product” will do just fine. So, it’s up to us outside observers to decipher the message and figure out what exactly are we looking at here.