Last week, Microsoft Ignite 2025 kicked off in San Francisco with a powerful opening keynote, packed with announcements across AI, security, Azure infrastructure, and modern work. At Olive + Goose, we’re inspired by these innovations. They align closely with our mission to help clients modernize securely, scale intelligently, and unlock the full potential of their technological investments – including agent driven AI. Below are the top 5 highlights from the keynote, and how they bring real measurable value to your organization.
1. Agent 365: A Control Plane for AI Agents
Agent 365 provides a centralized management and governance layer for AI agents. It lets you inventory all agents (including “shadow” agents), govern behavior, manage their lifecycle, and enforce security.
Why it matters: For organizations scaling up AI, unmanaged bots pose real risk. Agent 365 enables visibility, control, and trust so you can get the productivity benefits of agents without creating a security or compliance nightmare.
2. Security Copilot Agents & AI-Native Threat Hunting
Microsoft is embedding Security Copilot agents into its security stack (Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview) to automate and enhance threat detection, identity risk, and compliance. Capabilities like Predictive Shielding forecast where attackers might pivot next, and a “Threat Hunting Agent” lets security analysts ask natural-language questions to perform investigations. Plus, a unified Security Dashboard for AI surfaces risk insights across identity, data, and model posture.
Why it matters: Security teams can now operate with greater speed and intelligence. Instead of reacting manually to alerts, they can proactively hunt threats, ask “what if” questions, and get timely contextual insights.
3. Work IQ & Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents in Office Apps
Work IQ, the intelligence layer under Microsoft 365 Copilot, can connect to an organization’s data (emails, chats, files, meetings), learn work habits, and build memory over time. Microsoft is also bringing agent mode to Office apps, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, enabling more natural and context-rich workflows (e.g., generating documents, analyzing spreadsheets) with Copilot.
Why this matters: This brings a huge leap in productivity. Copilot agents can generate documents, analyze spreadsheets, summarize emails or meetings resulting in less friction, more creativity, and more time for high-value work.
4. Copilot in Azure
Azure Copilot is coming to the Azure portal, PowerShell, and CLI, with specialized agents (currently in private preview). These agents can assist with planning deployments, cost optimization, migration, and observability all with security guardrails. On the infrastructure side, Microsoft introduced Azure Boost (up to 20 Gbps remote storage, 1M IOPS, 400 Gbps network) and Azure Cobalt 200 (a custom data-center CPU with up to 50% performance uplift and built-in hardware security). Why this matters: Organizations can accelerate modernization, save on operational costs, and run more securely and efficiently on Azure, thanks to intelligent recommendations and high-performance, secure infrastructure.
5. Data & Analytics: Fabric IQ, Azure DocumentDB & Agentic Data Integration
Microsoft is unifying business semantic context through Fabric IQ, which brings together data from analytics, time series, operational systems, and more under a common model. Azure DocumentDB (formerly Cosmos DB for Mongo) is now generally available, with vector and hybrid search support, autoscaling, enterprise SLAs, and strong security features. Additionally, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers (e.g., for Dataverse), is available enabling AI agents to connect directly to business data sources and take actions in context. Why this matters: You get better data-driven insights, and agents that can act on your data. For example, agents can automatically run reports, trigger workflows, or surface predictions, all grounded in your business semantics.
How Olive + Goose can help:
At Olive + Goose, we bring together business consulting, technical consulting, and managed services to help you:
- Govern your AI agents safely with frameworks, policies, and oversight (Agent 365 adoption)
- Embed security deeply into your operations using the latest Microsoft products and solutions
- Modernize your Azure infrastructure
- Suggest data-driven agent workflows through real-time access to business context
- Build adoption and change management plans to ensure awareness and meaningful usage of your technology investments
Ready to turn what was announced at Ignite into strategic impact?
Get in touch with our team at [email protected].
Resources:
Microsoft Ignite 2025 Book of News
Ignite 2025: Drive the next era of software innovation with AI | Microsoft Community Hub
Security as the core primitive – Securing AI agents and apps | Microsoft Community Hub
Microsoft Ignite AI: Work IQ Fabric IQ Foundry IQ for Enterprise Agents | Windows Forum
