18–21 November 2025, Moscone Center, San Francisco (hybrid). First Ignite in SF. First Ignite where Satya Nadella did not deliver the main keynote — Judson Althoff (new CEO of Commercial Business) led. The framing: companies should become "Frontier Firms" — built around AI agents, not just AI features.
What we took away
- Microsoft Foundry. Azure AI Foundry rebranded as Microsoft Foundry. The new Foundry Control Plane gives unified visibility and anomaly detection across native, Microsoft, and third-party agents. The model catalog and router covers GPT-5 and Anthropic Claude running on Azure.
- Agent 365. Central control plane for governing AI agents across an organisation — identity, lifecycle, audit. Generally available in the Microsoft 365 admin centre via the Frontier program. Directly addresses the shadow agent governance fear EMEA customers raised throughout 2024.
- Microsoft Entra Agent ID. First-class identity, Conditional Access, lifecycle, and audit for AI agents. Treating agents as identities, not as service accounts.
- Microsoft Sentinel data lake GA, Sentinel graph + MCP server, Security Copilot agents (Threat Hunting Agent, Threat Intelligence Briefing Agent, Dynamic Threat Detection Agent) embedded in the Defender portal.
- Security Copilot is now included in Microsoft 365 E5 — a meaningful licensing shift for MSPs reselling E5 tenants in DACH.
- Defender for Cloud / Defender for AI Agents — AI-aware posture management, runtime protection, agent-specific recommendations.
Why it mattered for us
Agent 365 + Entra Agent ID are the two announcements that change how we will operate customer environments going forward. The era where every team experiments with an agent and no one knows what's authorised is ending. That's good news for serious MSPs and bad news for the spreadsheet-tracking version of "agent governance."
"The Frontier Firm." — Judson Althoff's framing for organisations whose operating model is built around AI agents.
We'll let our customers be the judge of whether they're frontier or rear. But we'll set up the controls either way.