Microsoft added agent accounts and business process memory to Copilot Studio on Oct. 15, giving agents built there their own identity in Microsoft 365 and a memory that carries forward from one round of a business process to the next. Jason Moore, vice president of product for Copilot Studio, announced the features in a blog post.
They’re rolling out through Microsoft’s Frontier early-access program. Moore framed them as tools for “managed agents that belong to the organization,” which “persist beyond any one individual’s role or tenure.”
Agents with accounts
An agent account lets an agent work in Microsoft 365 with its own credentials, “similar to how any person would,” Moore wrote. People can ask it questions or assign it work in Teams and Outlook, and @mention it in comments in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Someone can hand off a task by email and keep working while the agent continues.
Microsoft’s documentation adds detail. With an account, an agent gets its own Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft’s identity system, plus a mailbox and a presence across Microsoft 365.
The agent uses its own approved credentials and scoped permissions instead of borrowing a person’s, Moore wrote. That means its work can be attributed to the agent, so process owners can see which actions an agent took and which a person took. Administrators can scope access and manage the agent’s lifecycle, and Microsoft says more access, quality, cost and lifecycle controls are planned in the coming months.
Using the feature takes specific licensing. A maker needs a Microsoft 365 E5 license with the Agent 365 add-on, or an E7 license, and the agent account needs a Microsoft 365 Frontier for AI Teammates license, according to the documentation.
Shared memory
Business process memory lets an agent carry forward preferences and process details into each new cycle of work. “Any idiosyncrasy of the business process that one person raises to the agent then becomes a shared resource for everyone else to benefit from,” Moore wrote.
Microsoft’s FAQ spells out what that means. Anyone who works with the agent can see its shared memory, and “a record about one person can be used in later conversations with other people.” The agent is guided not to bring up one person’s details with someone else, but “shared memory has no privacy boundary between users,” the FAQ says.
Users can’t opt out of shared memory in this preview, and admins can’t turn it off without turning off agent accounts altogether. Everyone who interacts with the agent can view or delete its saved memories, and they’re deleted automatically if no one uses the agent for 28 days, according to the FAQ.
Microsoft also added triggers to the GitHub Copilot harness in Copilot Studio, so an agent can start work from an outside signal, such as an email, or on a schedule, with no prompt needed. Microsoft renamed the harness the Microsoft Copilot harness on Oct. 28.
Ooredoo Qatar is an early customer. Its executive business-case review agent works across Outlook, Teams and Word to review proposals, apply company policy and precedent and prepare briefs for executives, Moore wrote. Microsoft plans to show more at its Ignite conference, Nov. 17 to 20.
Source: Microsoft Copilot Blog, Jason Moore, VP of Product, Microsoft Copilot Studio, “Delegate shared business processes to agents that are more persistent and proactive”
Additional sources: Microsoft Learn, Microsoft, “Give your agent an account (Frontier)”; Microsoft Learn, Microsoft, “FAQ for agent accounts (Frontier)”
