Microsoft still sees AI agents as the future of work, and the enterprise software giant wants companies to be able to manage those agents just like human employees.

Agent 365 is not a platform for making enterprise AI tools; it’s a way to manage them, as if they were human employees. Companies using generative AI agents in their digital workplace can use Agent 365 to organize their growing sprawl of bots, keep tabs on how they’re performing, and tweak their settings. The tool is rolling out today in Microsoft’s early access program.

Essentially, Microsoft created a trackable workspace for agents. “Tools that you use to manage people, devices and applications today, you'd want to extend them to run agents as well in the future,” says Charles Lamanna, a president of business and industry for Microsoft’s Copilot, its AI chatbot.

Lamanna envisions a future where companies have many more agents performing labor than humans. For example, if a company has 100,000 employees, he sees them as using “half a million to a million ...