Microsoft unifies E5, Copilot and Agent 365 into single solution

Microsoft has announced its 365 E7: The Frontier Suite, with general availability of Microsoft 365 E7 and Microsoft Agent 365 arriving on May 1, 2026.

Microsoft 365 E7 brings together Microsoft 365 E5 for secure productivity, Entra Suite for identity and access control, Microsoft 365 Copilot for AI in the flow of work, and Agent 365 as the control plane to govern and scale agents, all grounded in shared intelligence from Work IQ.

It will be available for purchase on May 1 at a retail price of US$99 (A$140) per user per month and is claimed by Microsoft as offering up to 15% incremental savings when purchased as an integrated suite.

Partners will receive performance credit for incremental revenue from Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 E7 SKUs, directly aligning Copilot expansion with Microsoft 365 E7 growth and aiming to strengthens partners' ability to turn Copilot momentum into governed agent scale and long-term services revenue.

To support partner engagement across the customer journey, starting April 1, 2026, Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 will be included as eligible workloads for the core, strategic product accelerator, and growth levers in Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) incentives.

In addition, partners can leverage the promotional offers aligned to Microsoft 365 E7 designed to create a lower‑friction entry point for customers to move from AI experimentation to enterprise execution, while enabling partners to lead with higher‑value conversations around governance, security, and operationalisation of AI agents.

Microsoft also announced the May 1 general availability of Microsoft Agent 365.

Priced at US$15 (A$21) per user, Agent 365 aims to give IT and security leaders a single place to observe, govern, manage and secure agents across the organisation — using the same infrastructure, applications and protections they currently use to manage people today.

Microsoft claimed that in just two months, tens of millions of agents have appeared in the Agent 365 Registry, with tens of thousands of customers already adopting Agent 365.

Microsoft has also been using Agent 365 as ’customer zero’, with visibility into more than 500,000 agents across the company with the most widely used focused on research, coding, sales intelligence, customer triage and HR self-service.

Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot arrives

Working closely with Anthropic, Microsoft has brought the technology that powers Claude Cowork into Microsoft 365 Copilot.

With Cowork, Copilot can break down complex requests into steps, reason across tools and files, and carry work forward with visible progress and opportunities. Tasks are no longer confined to a single turn or a single app and can run for minutes or hours, coordinating actions and producing outputs.

By combining Anthropic’s agentic model for multi-step tasks with Microsoft 365, Cowork aims to deliver a managed, enterprise‑grade experience that pairs reasoning with the controls enterprises expect.

Cowork is being tested with a limited set of customers as a research preview and will be available through the Frontier program later this month.

With Wave 3, Claude is also now available in mainline chat in Copilot via the Frontier program, alongside the latest generation of OpenAI models, which continue to roll out with new releases.

Wave 3 of Copilot will now also work alongside users in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, creating, editing, and refining content from start to finish inside a document, spreadsheet, presentation, or email, using Work IQ to inform the context of the work.

Work IQ is the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to know how people work, with whom they work, and the content upon which they collaborate.

Users will now have an “enhanced” chat experience in Copilot with the ability to create and augment artifacts, and the power to build their own agents within the canvas they work in every day.

Microsoft claimed to have recently delivered its strongest quarter yet with Copilot, with paid seats growing more than 160% year over year and daily active usage up ten times, with the number of customers deploying Copilot at significant scale — more than 35,000 seats — tripling year over year.

2025 saw Security Copilot agents directly built into the flow of work for security teams using Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Purview, as well as the company introducing a specialisation for partners to demonstrate their experience and skills related to Microsoft 365 Copilot, including Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and agents.