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All announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2025 at a glance | Arxus
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Microsoft Ignite 2025: our favorite announcements and why they matter for your business

Have you soaked up all the exciting updates and announcements from this year’s Microsoft Ignite? Because we certainly have: from exciting updates to Microsoft Copilot and AI agents to brand-new features for Windows 365, Microsoft Foundry and much more. Let’s dive straight into the details. And go over our favorite highlights from the event.

Thu, 27 November 2025

Kevin Meuldermans | Arxus

Kevin Meuldermans

Data & AI Engineer, Arxus

Microsoft Copilot and AI agents

In this year’s edition of Ignite, AI was the common thread across the board, reflecting Microsoft’s ongoing effort to streamline AI adoption and agent-building across different industries. With lots of new tools and features, your organization will have a broader range of options to design, deploy, and manage intelligent agents that suit your business needs.

1. Launching Microsoft IQ

Microsoft introduced the IQ Stack, a collection of intelligence layers designed to make their AI Copilots and agents more context-aware. Each IQ layer is focused on a specific Microsoft stack:

  • Work IQ, for example, builds on the current M365 semantic index. This means it will now also understand your work style, habits, workflows, interaction with colleagues and build relationships between those data points and all available M365 data.
  • Fabric and Foundry IQ represent their respective technology stacks. Fabric IQ will serve as the intelligent layer between your OneLake sources, while Foundry IQ gives you the opportunity to build that layer across Azure data sources.

What's the added value for your business?

These IQ layers first and foremost promise to improve the overall user experience when using AI within Microsoft applications since they will have a better understanding of your personal context and that of your business. These insights should make them able to provide more accurate and relevant responses.

Secondly the Microsoft IQ will be available for you to use when building agents, meaning that you can tap into all the knowledge and relationship building you have within your Microsoft tenant to build better agent experiences.

2. Introduction of Agent 365

Microsoft launched Agent 365, an extension to the Microsoft Control System and a centralized control hub for managing AI agents across Microsoft and third-party ecosystems. It includes a registry, access control, dashboards, and security integration with Entra, Defender, and Purview.

What's the added value for your business?

Given the rise of AI agents it has become clear that governance and management is very important to prevent agent sprawl. Unmanaged agents pose compliance and security risks and Agent 365 aims to solve this by treating agents like digital employees, assigning them unique IDs, enforcing least-privilege access, and providing full observability. This is critical for scaling AI safely and responsibly, ensuring governance without stifling innovation.

3. Agents in Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft Foundry is trying to take agent development to the next level with updates that make building smarter, more connected and easier. At the heart of these improvements is a unified catalog of Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, designed with security and governance in mind. Developers can now discover a curated list of both public and private MCP tools from a single, secure interface in Microsoft Foundry

To accelerate innovation, Foundry also introduces prebuilt AI service tools. These ready-to-use MCP servers bring transcription, translation, voice interaction, and intelligent document processing right out of the box, so developers can add capabilities without starting from scratch.

What's the added value for your business?

That means that agents can tap into real-time data from over 1,400 enterprise systems like SAP, Salesforce, and HubSpot through Logic Apps connectors. This allows agents to access context from a wide range of tools increasing their potential for day-to-day operations.

Together, these updates empower organizations to build agents that are deeply integrated, highly capable, and fully governed – unlocking new possibilities for automation and AI-driven workflows.

4. Improvements to agent security

Copilot Studio now includes an agent evaluation module, allowing them to be monitored in real-time and giving them an Entra ID. Agent Evaluation introduces automated testing for AI agents built in Copilot Studio. It runs agents through a series of predefined scenarios and queries, then grades their responses against expected outcomes. Very easy to use and helpful to get a quick understanding of how accurate your agent is.

With real-time agent monitoring you can now connect security tools such as Microsoft Defender, third-party tools, or custom solutions directly into agent runs. This means every agent interaction can be monitored for threats like prompt injection attacks or malicious behavior.

What's the added value for your business?

With the Entra integration for agents you can now provide a unique identity to every agent. This way you can more easily manage and maintain your inventory of AI assets, including shadow agents. It also supports lifecycle governance, ensuring agents are created, managed, and deactivated according to your policies. With this Entra integration, admins can enforce access controls, prevent orphaned or overprivileged agents, and use tools like Agent 365 for further management.

As organizations build more custom agents, quality and trust become very important. These new features provide visibility into agent behavior, helping your teams fine-tune performance and prevent misuse.

Virtual desktop solutions

1. Bringing AI and agents to Windows 365

Windows 365 for Agents lets you set up Computer Using Agents (CUA) in Copilot Studio, enabling you to automate almost anything through natural language. The service is backed by the powerful Windows 365 platform and also supports Linux VMs.

It will follow your prompts and perform clicks on your behalf, take screenshots, analyze what needs to be done, and determine where to click before moving to the next action. It is easy to troubleshoot and debug, and it allows you to automate repetitive tasks, even platforms without any APIs.

2. Introducing AI-enabled Cloud PCs

Microsoft will be bringing several Copilot+ PC features to Windows 365 with the launch of AI-enabled Cloud PCs. New additions to the existing capabilities include:

  • Click To Do: processes your screen context with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and performs actions on the selected text.
  • Semantic Search: allows you to use natural language queries to quickly find relevant content stored on your computer.

3. Introducing Windows 365 Cloud Apps

Application streaming has finally arrived to Windows 365 with the addition of Cloud Apps. It offers your users quick access to individual applications, without having to give each of them a dedicated Cloud PC. And the best part? You don’t need any experience with VDI infrastructure to set it up.

With Cloud Apps, it’s all about user-friendliness and fast scalability.

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4. Improvements to Windows 365 Frontline Shared

Windows 365 Frontline Shared (FLS) now has persistence through User Experience Sync (UES), which provides a fully managed profile solution. It allows you to store user data on the previously non-persistent Frontline Shared environment and enables more advanced scenarios.

For instance, you’ll be able to save user preferences in storage ranging from 4GB up to 64 GB. It’s not built on top of FSLogix and does not require any VDI knowledge to set up or use. Microsoft handles everything for you.

5. Better business continuity for Cloud PCs

Microsoft also introduced Windows 365 Reserve. It offers a reliable business continuity insurance, giving users temporary, secure, and dedicated Cloud PC access whenever their primary device is unavailable or broken. Each user receives up to ten days of Cloud PC access per year, ensuring they can stay productive during unexpected disruptions.

Windows 365 Reserve is now generally available.

Inspired by the announcements?

We’re already looking forward to experiment with all of the brand-new features. And cannot wait to implement them in your modern workplace, so that you can enjoy improved productivity, efficiency and flexibility.

Our experts are eager to share all the new features from Microsoft Ignite | Arxus

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