Microsoft Ignite 2025 Recap
Microsoft Ignite 2025 is one of the highlights of the year for anyone interested about the future of work—and this year was no exception. I’m attending Microsoft Ignite in person in San Francisco. The conference theme centers on AI at every layer: from the cloud and security powering AI to the everyday tools where we collaborate with AI. We’re entering an era where agents, digital employees, are becoming part of the workforce. IDC even predicts 1.3 billion AI agents by 2028, so Frontier Firms that embrace this shift early will have a major edge. Frontier Firms treat AI agents as digital employees and teammates, achieving in hours what used to take weeks, and focusing human effort on higher-level goals. To get there, companies will need their own “Agent Factory” – a system to design, train, deploy, govern, and retire AI agents at scale. These themes – AI everywhere, digital employees, and empowering every worker with Copilot – are clear at Ignite 2025.
I thought about writing a lengthy article about news, but as there are such a good articles from Microsoft about these, I decided not to. Instead I will be coming back to these topics later on, sharing my experiences as I get them.
Highlights
- Microsoft Agent 365: The control plane for governing agents at scale. It lets IT track every agent in the organization (with unique IDs), control what data they can access, and apply security/governance just like for human users. Bottom line: Enterprises get a safe, centralized way to manage this new AI workforce. Available now in Microsoft 365 admin center with the Frontier program. This is big news!
- Agent Modes in Word, Excel, PowerPoint: Copilot’s in-app Agent Mode (iterative co-creation within the app) is in Frontier program for PowerPoint and has enhanced in Word and Excel. This means users can work alongside AI inside their documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to draft, edit, format, and update content in real time. Agent mode in Word is now generally available, Excel and PowerPoint agent modes are in Frontier program.
- Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ – Unified Intelligence: Microsoft introduced a universal context layer that combines Work IQ (your organizational 365 data), Fabric IQ (analytics data modeled with business meaning), and Foundry IQ (knowledge retrieval across multiple sources). These give Copilot and agents a much deeper understanding of what you’re working on and what things mean in your business. For example, Work IQ learns your workflows, preferences, and company knowledge from emails, files, meetings, etc., so Copilot can personalize its help. Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ ground AI in rich business data and real-time knowledge, so agents reason over trusted information rather than just the web. Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ are in preview.
- Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) is the enterprise platform to build, run, and manage AI models and agents at scale. It offers a catalog of Model Context Protocol tools MCP (including 1,400+ Logic Apps connectors to popular systems) to enrich agents with real-time business logic. A new Model Router (GA) auto-selects the best AI model per query to optimize speed/cost, supporting GPT-4.1, GPT-5, and other leading models. The Foundry Agent Service provides an enterprise runtime for agents with features (in preview) like hosted agents, built-in long-term memory, and multi-agent workflow orchestration. And the Foundry Control Plane (preview) gives devs an operations center to monitor agent performance, set guardrails, and enforce security with Entra Agent IDs and Defender/Purview integrations. In short: Foundry is your AI factory in the cloud – pick or bring the models you want, build complex agents, and run them safely with enterprise oversight.
A few other highlights from Microsoft Foundry include
Azure Content Understanding is now generally available with a new bring-your-own model option starting with GPT family of models, support for VNETs, managed identities, CMKs, expanded regions, and simplified pricing.
Live Interpreter is now generally available, delivering real-time multilingual interpretation for inclusive global collaboration. This is the same underlying technology that powers the Interpreter agent in Microsoft Teams.
LLM Speech brings advanced speech-to-text transcription and translation with prompting and diarization, available in public preview.
Photo Avatar, powered by VASA-1, enables lifelike avatars from a single photo, also available in preview.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot will have OpenAI’s Sora 2 video model in the Create experience. It allows to generate short AI-generated video clips from natural language prompts or swap out stock footage with AI-generated content within their video projects. Video projects will have built-in tools for voiceover, music and brand kits to ensure that content is consistent. Sora 2 is available in the Frontier program.
Microsoft Is Operationalizing AI at Every Level
Looking at all of these announcements (and that was just a scratch on the surface!), it’s clear that Microsoft is operationalizing AI at every level: personal productivity, team collaboration, business processes, IT management, and the underlying platform.
For enterprises, these announcements are transformative. We now have the tools to build an AI-powered organization safely with Agent 365, Copilot Studio, Foundry, Microsoft 365 Copilot , and others. Security and compliance are being addressed hand-in-hand with Entra Agent IDs, Purview DLP for Copilot, etc.
The Workday Is Changing — And AI Is Already Here
For employees, the workday is about to change (or for some, already has). Instead of wrestling with blank documents, we start with drafts. Instead of digging through inboxes and systems, we ask Copilot or an agent to surface what we need. Instead of repetitive admin tasks, we supervise our digital assistants doing them. There’s a buzz of empowerment here on-site – everyone is swapping stories of how Copilot or an agent saved them time or sparked a new idea.
We’re literally experiencing the future of work right now. If you’ve been holding off on exploring AI in your daily work, yesterday was the time to start. The tools are becoming mainstream, and those who learn to use them will benefit immensely in productivity and capability.
