According to Tom Warren from The Verge, Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna shared an internal memo on August 6th to his Business & Industry Copilot (BIC) team. This was reported on The Notepad newsletter (subscription required):
“Agent 365 is now an official Microsoft product”, as reported by The Verge.
That’s as much as we know about Agent 365 so far. What we can do, though, is combine this piece of news with our understanding of what MS has been doing with Copilot so far, as well as what we know about Lamanna’s BIC crew. Which was still called “Business Applications and Platforms” (BAP) only a year ago.
Not to be confused with Microsoft Agent
That 365 part in the new product’s name is crucial. Because originally, Microsoft Agent technology was released already back in 1997:
Microsoft Agent was a virtual assistant user interface developed by Microsoft which employs animated characters, text-to-speech engines, and speech recognition software to enhance interaction with computer users. It could be used to present interactions with an intelligent assistant. It came pre-installed as part of Windows 2000 and later versions of Microsoft Windows up to Windows Vista.
Even I am too much of a newbie in the Microsoft ecosystem to have ever seen books like this that the MS Press published for developers to extend and embed agentic technology into their apps:
Apart from Clippy, originally “Clippit” developed by the MS Office team, nothing much remains in the collective minds of IT folks about this particular era of agents. But now it’s 2025 and we have a bit more tech stack in the cloud to build on, hence the Microsoft Agent 365 initiative.
Beyond Copilot
I have done my fair share of documenting the criticism around Microsoft’s attempt to force Copilot on every single one of their customers. What was originally quite a brilliant choice for a brand name has been suffering from how MS doesn’t make it an opt-in choice for paying customers. Or even opt-out, when you just want to go to your trusted Office apps instead of taking a detour through the Microsoft 365 Copilot UI. Yay, such a productivity boost…
In some ways, what Microsoft is doing with Copilot Studio is the smartest possible way they could combine the new innovations in LLMs with real-life business applications and processes that enterprise customers run in the MS cloud. Just like Power Platform was built on the foundation of Dynamics CRM when going beyond the canvas apps UI layer, Copilot Studio agents are laid on top of all the connectivity and management capabilities Power Platform has accrued over the past few years. This should be the key to winning in the market - if it was only about technology and not also the brand image.
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