Moment: Microsoft’s James Oleinik on Building and Managing Agents with Agent 365

In this moment, excerpted from the session “The Impact and Opportunity of Agent 365 for Partners“, James Oleinik, Partner Director of Product Management, Microsoft, highlights important areas of Agent 365 for users, including the ways Microsoft is expanding its capabilities and how users still have control when managing the agents they build.

Key Takeaways

• Agent 365: From IT admins in the M365 Admin Center to CIOs in Intune, Agent 365 meets various roles and personas where they work today. “We’re not trying to create an island with Agent 365,” Oleinik explains. “We’re trying to build the common infrastructure, that fabric that you can deploy to our customers and, in many cases, leveraging a lot of these same kinds of capabilities for humans and applications, and extending that to these agentic applications of agents.”
• Extending the agent: An important element in the development of Agent 365 is that Microsoft is not building a new stack but extending capabilities that its been building out into an emerging landscape. Oleinik presents an area that a lot of time has been dedicated to working on: making Agent 365 not be opinionated on how users build the agents.
• Managing with Agent 365: The important thing is that no matter how you build agents at Microsoft, they’re managed and integrated in Agent 365. It has standardized observability and honors the governance and controls of Agent 365 out of the box.