Summary
Contoso Financial Services launched Microsoft Agent 365 into a situation where 14 agents were sitting in an approval queue. The department heads were deploying agents without review, and the security team had no central view of what agents were active or what they were doing. Three months after rollout, the governance process is operational, the agent catalog is reviewed and documented, and an anomalous Sunday-night usage pattern indicated a policy violation was caught, investigated, and addressed.
Review what you accomplished
You enabled Microsoft Agent 365 by navigating to Agents in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and explored the management interface—the Agent Registry, Requests tab, and the Available and Blocked status views within All agents. You identified the role requirements (AI Administrator or Global Administrator) and confirmed that a Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required.
You worked through the agent approval process, reviewing each pending agent against evaluation criteria: least-privilege permissions, trusted publisher, clear business purpose, and compliance with organizational policy. You applied user scope restrictions to limit approved agents to the requesting department rather than all users, reviewed connector permissions for alignment with Power Platform Data Loss Protection (DLP) policies, and documented blocking decisions with reasons to support consistent governance. Of Contoso's 14 pending agents, 10 were approved, 3 were blocked with documented justification, and 1 was returned for clarification.
You used the activity monitoring capabilities in Agent 365 to review interaction volumes and identify usage anomalies. You explored the enforcement actions available like blocking an agent during investigation, narrowing user scope as adoption expands beyond intent, and revoking approval when agents no longer meet policy requirements. The governance cycle you established (approve, monitor, review, remediate) provides a repeatable framework for managing the agent estate as it grows.
In this module, you learned how to:
- Enable and navigate the Microsoft Agent 365 management interface in the Microsoft 365 admin center
- Register agents and apply access controls to enforce organizational policies
- Monitor agent activity and enforce governance controls using Microsoft Agent 365
Apply your learning
You now have the tools to govern AI agents across your organization's Microsoft 365 environment. As agent adoption grows, the discipline of consistent approval criteria, documented blocking decisions, and regular activity review will determine whether your AI security posture strengthens or erodes over time.
Tip
To explore Microsoft Agent 365 capabilities and governance workflows in depth, see Microsoft Agent 365 overview.